It is well known that the size of the informal (black or grey) economy causes serious fiscal problems for Hungary. This study makes an attempt to quantify the budgetary and macroeconomic effects of different ways of widening the formal sector (whiteningʺ) with the help of a model. It turns out...

In order to shed light on the consequences of the ongoing financial crisis, ETLA conducted two surveys at the end of October 2008. The firm survey targeted firms employing at least 10 persons in Finland (2,017 observations with a response rate of 33%) and the consumer survey targeted...

This paper describes the main features of a model developed for fore-casting economic developments, energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions in the EU area and Finland as well as for simulating the economic impacts of EU climate policy. Climate policy analysis necessitates a model of the whole...

The actors of economy and politics all over the world have long debated about the effect private equity investments make on economy. The debate focuses on the effect of a narrow group of private equity investments, namely, Leveraged Buyouts (LBO), while nobody questions the positive impact of...

Measuring non-cognitive skills in evaluations of education policy interventions is an increasingly important task. At the same time, choosing the adequate measures is difficult. Contrary to cognitive development, there is a shortage of reliable and valid measures of personality and behavioral...

This paper aims at estimating the effect of the kindergarten allowance program (a conditional cash transfer program organized by the government) introduced in Hungary in January 2009. We use institutional kindergarten data and municipality-level demographic data spanning ten years (2001 through...

The paper investigates the effect of teacher characteristics (experience, level of education attainment and credentials, gender) on the achievement of eighth grade students using matched student-teacher data from the 1999, 2003 and 2007 TIMSS surveys. The analysis covers European countries, thus...