Non-cognitive skills are important predictors of success on the labour market and in many areas of economic and social life. This paper explores the current literature on the economics of non-cognitive skill formation and the most important explanatory factors behind the recent boost of the...

Institutions of the liberal democracies of the developed Western world are increasingly insufficient to deal with the ever worsening of social problems associated with technological progress, the rapid economic transformation of the economy, the demographic issues and the acceleration of...

In 2013, an extensive centralization process began in Hungarian public education, transferring all schools previously maintained by municipalities to a central education provider agency. This paper aims to examine the impact of the centralisation process on student performance in Hungary at both...

Educational accountability is a timely topic in Hungary, because the law of LXXI/2006 has practically introduced educational accountability. School report cards have been published for the third time in 2011 for each school with a 6th, 8th or 10th grade. These report cards publicize information...

The starting point of this paper is a widely shared fundamental preference according to which Hungary should follow a fast, sustainable development path and catch up with the developed world in the foreseeable future. Questions raised in this paper are related to the instrumental preferences....

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...

This paper estimates the effect of school starting age on academic performance using the 2006 "National Assessment of Basic Competencies" (NABC), focusing on disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged children. The instrumental variable estimates of the school starting age imply that those who start...

The paper uses data from a large representative survey of Hungarian higher education graduates (DPR 2010) to study the early labour market effects of field of study and college quality. Propensity score matching average treatment effect method is used to reveal the effect of the field of study,...

Although apprenticeship training has been praised for its effectiveness in smoothing the school-to-work transition of non-college bound students in Western European dual education systems, there is a lack of evidence from Central Eastern Europe. Using a unique individual-level panel database,...

The paper uses data from a large representative survey of Hungarian higher education graduates (DPR 2010) to study the early labour market effects of field of study and college quality. Propensity score matching average treatment effect method is used to reveal the effect of the field of study,...