Primary degree holders have extraordinarily low employment rates in Central and East European (CEE) countries, a bias that largely contributes to their low levels of aggregate employment. The paper looks at the possible role for skills mismatch in explaining this failure. The analysis is based...

This paper aims at the evaluation of the reform of vocational education introduced in 1998 in Hungary. The reform extended the duration of education by one year, and increased teaching time spent on non-vocational subjects. The reform affected two of the three tracks in upper-secondary education...

This study analyses properties of fast growing small and medium sized firms, known as gazelles. Using balance sheet information for the 2000-2008 period, we show that a small fraction of companies is responsible for a large share of new jobs created in the business sector. For instance, the top...

Using a large panel of Hungarian firms, we study the relation between firm size and net job creation. Categorizing firms in size groups with the traditionally used measure of employment size in the base year suggests that small firms create a disproportionally higher number of jobs than large...

This paper analyses the employment adjustment of state- and privately-owned companies before and during the global crisis. Using Hungarian data, it finds that the net job creation rate is similar across the two ownership types before the crisis, but during the crisis state-owned companies have a...

Hungarian legislation provides firms with financial incentives to train apprentices from vocational training schools. In line with these incentives, it is observed that firms increasingly train apprentices over the period 2003-2011, in particular, in the sectors manufacturing, construction,...

Skill biased technical change arrived to Hungary with the transition to market economy. As Hungary integrated into the international economy, technical change progressed much faster in some sectors than in mature market economies. That lead to increasing skill premia, intensive rent sharing, and...

Since 2006, the law has changed in a way that the expected wage of the employers has to be at least the double of the minimum wage. The employers who pay less than this amount to their employees are more likely to be audited by the tax authority. According to my hypothesis this change has...

We estimate the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) acquisitions on firm-average and worker-specific wages using universal firm-level panel data and linked employer-employee data for Hungary. Our identification strategy exploits a 23 year-long panel with 4,926 foreign acquisitions to...

The share of female workers is significantly higher i the public than the private sector. This could be due to several reasons: different preferences towards job characteristics, or perhaps to lower discrimination against women in the public sector due to strict wage grids and hiring and...