Shadow (psychology)

About: Shadow (psychology) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8396 publications have been published within this topic receiving 117158 citations.

The Risk Taker As Shadow: A Psychoanlytic View Of The Collapse Of Barings Bank*

Abstract: This paper examines the collapse of Barings Bank in 1995 as a consequence of the activities of Nick Leeson, a 27-year-old trader. It seeks an explanation for this event using psychoanalytic concepts and their application to organizational dynamics. It is argued here that the anxiety associated with ‘Big Bang’– the deregulation of the UK financial sector – drove Barings’ senior executives to engage in primitive basic assumption thinking which involved the seeking out of a ‘saviour’ who could be depended on to ‘rescue’ the bank. Further, their concerns about their own conservatism led these senior executives to create as ‘saviour’ an opposite or ‘shadow’ to themselves. They therefore set up the highly risky ‘Baring Securities’ operation, unwittingly creating a damaging cultural split between it and the conservative heart of the bank. Then – in choosing Nick Leeson to embody the ‘shadow’ role within Baring Securities – they selected an extreme risk taker least able to ‘save’ the bank. In the event, Leeson’s fraud ruined the bank. It is further argued that Leeson was burdened with unconscious guilt, thus leaving clues about his activities with the hope that someone would halt him. However, basic assumption thinking within Barings prevented this from happening.

Size and Development of the Shadow Economies of 157 Worldwide Countries: Updated and New Measures from 1999 to 2013

Abstract: This paper is a first attempt to study the size and development of the shadow economies of 157 countries between 1999 and 2013. Using a MIMIC model, we find that higher tax and regulatory burden, unemployment and self-employment rates are drivers of the shadow economy, meaning that an increase in these causal variables increases the shadow economy. Our result also confirms previous findings of Friedrich Schneider, Andreas Buehn and Claudia Montenegro. The estimated average of informality of 157 countries around the world, including developing, eastern European, central Asian and high income OECD countries averaged over 1999 to 2013 is 33.77% of official GDP. A critical discussion about the size of these macro-estimates comes to the conclusion that most likely the “true” shadow economy of these countries is only 69% of their estimated macro-MIMIC-values.

Estimating the size of the shadow economy in Spain: a structural model with latent variables

Abstract: There has recently been a revival of international interest in measuring the size of the shadow economy. The current study adopts an approach to the Spanish case that is based on the theory of unobservable variables. This methodology involves the estimation of structural models (MIMIC) which analyses a set of causes of the shadow economy while simultaneously taking into account its influence upon a series of indicators. The proposed model permits the determination of a relative evolution over time of the size of the shadow economy, which requires the calibration of the model with an exogenous estimation in order to obtain real values. The exogenous estimation employed is that obtained by a monetary method based on a money demand function. The results show a considerable shadow economy, measuring between 8 and 18.8% of GDP in the period 1976–2002, and demonstrate that the shadow economy is significantly influenced by the tax burden, the degree of regulation and unit labour costs. A positive correlation is ...