Uncovering illegal and underground economies: The case of mafia extortion racketeering
提出一种量化隐藏经济成本的新方法，应用于意大利北部黑手党敲诈勒索，通过匹配观察到的资源错配与模型预测，估算出受敲诈企业产出损失0.5%-5%，总增加值损失0.6%-8%。
I propose a new approach to quantify the economic cost of hidden economies and apply it to the case of mafia extortion in Northern Italy. To quantify the extortion rate, unobserved in the data, I first show that extortion racketeering is linked to resource misallocation. Then, I implement a structural estimation based on matching the observed misallocation in markets defined as mafia-infiltrated, with that predicted from a model whose parameters are estimated using data on non-mafia markets or calibrated from the literature. The results suggest that the share of output that the mafia extorts from firms ranges between 0.5 and 5 percent of firm-level output for those firms that are subject to extortion, with an implied loss between 0.6 and 8 percent of aggregate value added.