To the extent minimum-wage regulation is effective in fighting against excessive earnings handicaps of those at the bottom of earnings distribution, it may have the side-effect of worsening their employment prospects. A demand-and-supply interpretation of data on the relative employment rate and...

We estimate a double hurdle (DH) model of the Hungarian wage distribution assuming censoring at the minimum wage and wage under-reporting (i.e. compensation consisting of the minimum wage, subject to taxation, and an unreported cash supplement). We estimate the probability of under-reporting for...

The paper measures the impact of a wage subsidy for long term unemployed workers, using a large administrative dataset from Hungary. While such subsidies are often promoted as an efficient way to speed up the recovery of the economy or to increase demand for low skilled workers, existing...

The paper investigates the role of the minimum wage in a competi- tive economy in which there is underreporting of earnings by employed labour. The minimum wage induces higher compliance by some low- productivity workers and transforms a nominally neutral .scal system into a regressive one. A...

In 1998, the left-of-center government of Hungary carved out a second pillar mandatory private pension system from the original mono-pillar public system. Participation in the mixed system was optional for those who were already working, but mandatory for new entrants to the workforce. About 50...

By 2008, the Hungarian pension system has become too generous and the implied contribution rate hindered growth. When the international economic and financial crisis deprived Hungary from normal credits, its government turned to international organizations for help. The most spectacular element...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the effect of changing the retirement age on employment. Base on individual data from Hungary, a country where a number of hikes increased the retirement age between 1997 and 2009, this analysis benefits from substantial variation in pension eligibility...

Pension systems fight myopia and reduce old-age poverty. Our simple model introduces heterogeneous wages, flexible labor supply, progressive personal income tax and pension credit. The socially optimal transfer system is close to the means-tested one proposed by Feldstein (1987).

Nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) pension systems have recently become popular because they provide the strong incentives of the private funded systems without requiring a difficult transition period. Using the framework of mechanism design, these systems have theoretically been criticized...

van Groezen, Leers and Meijdam (2003) (for short, GLM) analyzed combination of public pension and child support in an OLG model. We impose credit constraint on workers, and extend GLM's analysis from the case where workers do not understand the cost also to the case where they do. GLM's infinite...