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 (whitening”) with the help of a model. It turns out...

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...

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...

The study aims to revisit some of the macroeconomic issues related to Hungary's eurozone-accession. The government postponed euro-adoption until 2020 without any explanation, which is one of the motivations of our analysis. We review the arguments formulated in 2000-2004 regarding the adoption...

This paper describes the impact of the global crisis on China, the central and local level government responses and preferences it triggered as well as the consequences these reactions had on national and regional levels. It focuses on the immediate economic and general systemic reasons of the...

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...