Beck et al. (2010) find that access to finance has a stronger impact on tax evasion for small firms, firms located in small cities, and firms in industries that rely more heavily on external finance. La Porta and Shleifer (2008) find that the underground economy is negatively associated with the availability of private credit and individuals' subjective assessment of their access to credit. Using cross-country data, Bose et al. (2012) find that bank development is negatively associated with the size of the underground economy.
Ellul et al. (2012) use micro-economic data from World scope and from the World Bank Enterprise Survey and find that investment and access to finance are positively correlated with accounting transparency and negatively with tax pressure.
They also find that transparency is negatively correlated with tax pressure, particularly in sectors where firms are less dependent on external finance, and that financial development encourages greater transparency by firms that are more dependent on external finance. Existing empirical studies, however, do not address the issue of endogeneity and the potential reverse causality argument that a large underground economy limits the growth of financial intermediaries