Hungary has been a front-runner in the transition to capitalism. It has also experienced exceptionally radical changes in employment and relative wages. One main feature of these changes is an enormous increase in the returns to skill. This paper argues that it is instructive to divide the...

The paper analyzes the changes in the relative labor market position of the public sector employees, using both macro-level employment statistics and large wage surveys. While competitive employment decreased by more than 30 per cent during the transition, number of public employees have not...

The Roma or "Gypsies" are Europe's largest and poorest ethnic minority. Nearly 80 per cent of them live in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The Roma - Non-Roma educational gap, always substantial but slowly closing in the communist years, widened again after the...

This study estimates the expected long-term budgetary benefits to investing into Roma education in Hungary. By budgetary benefits we mean the direct financial benefits to the national budget. The main idea is that investing extra public money into Roma education would pay off even in fiscal...

This paper proposes a simple method for estimating the lock-in effects of switching costs from firm-level data. We compare the behavior of already contracted consumers to the behavior of new consumers as the latter can serve as contrafactual to the former. In panel regressions on firms' incoming...