Are people more likely to be satisfied with their lives if they had freedom from regulations, if they had the ability to trade freely internationally? In light of the demographic aging phenomenon we are facing, the present study analyzes the relationship between economic freedom and life satisfaction among European older adults. In order to do so, we are using data from the European Health, Ageing, and Retirement Survey and Economic Freedom of the World. By using the ordered logit regression method, we estimated different models to identify how sub-indicators of economic freedom affect the subjective well-being. According to the findings, the quality of the institutions that define the legal system and establish rules for the protection of private property and sound monetary policy have a positive effect on subjective well-being. On the other hand, openness to international trade has a negative effect and government and regulation doesn’t show any significance.

Crises, such as the current pandemic, and the measures meant to tackle with them tend to increase the presence of the informal sector in the official economy, affecting mostly the emerging and developing economies. This situation is characteristic for the eleven CEE countries. These also display certain weaknesses at the economic and institutional level, which increase their vulnerability in times of crisis, with a real danger for the informal economy to grow.This paper aims to investigate the role of the institutional framework in explaining shadow economy in the mentioned countries. The methodological approach consists in a panel analysis using data from the 1996-2017 period and a principal component analysis meant to identify the specificities of each country. Our results demonstrate the influence of both formal and informal institutions on the shadow economy while country-level particularities show that institutional factors act differently in different socio-economic and political environments; consequently, the measures aimed to limit shadow economy should be adapted to each country’s specific context.