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 considers two aspects of the targeting of unemployment benefit systems (a) the probability that benefit is received in the population of those unemployed on standard international criteria of search and availability, and (b) the probability in the population of benefit recipients that...

The study estimates the effect of school starting age on academic performance for Hungarian grade four students using the "Progress in International Reading Literacy Study" (PIRLS) and the "Trends in Mathematics and Science Study" (TIMMS). The study uses the control function approach, exploiting...

The paper considers child poverty in Hungary, a country at the forefront of the transition process. We investigate how household characteristics are associated with the incidence, persistence and dynamics of poverty among children in Hungary, looking at the years 1992-96. We find that children...

Considerable amounts of time and money are spent on job-training of school-leavers graduated from higher-education institutions. More than a half of the employees in our sample participated in job-training between graduation date (1999) and September 2000. The work in this paper considers two...

The impact of the administration of unemployment benefits on time spent unemployed is a neglected issue in discussion of incentive effects in Central and Eastern Europe. We use Labour Force Survey data, ad-ministrative registers and inspection of benefit office practices to show that there is...

Millions of East-Europeans started businesses during the transformational recession but, according to a wide-spread interpretation, many of them did so only temporarily and 'unwillingly' under the threat of unemployment. The paper looks at the relevance of the 'disguised unemployment approach to...

In this study standard Mincer earnings equations are estimated using both ordinary least squares (OLS) and quantile regression in order to give a comprehensive picture of the returns to education in Germany and Hungary for the year 2000. To make the cross-country comparison of the returns to...

The paper looks at outflows from registered unemployment in Hungary between 1992 and 1996 using microdata from the unemployment insurance system. We address two questions. First, we investigate the trends in outflows in the period. A related question is whether the decline in the unemployment...

The paper investigates the wage determination of Hungarian highereducation graduates with using two samples of Hungarian careerbeginners, applying IV techniques and the multiple indicator solution so as to diminish potential estimation biases due to endogeneity of independent variables...