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...

Transition from socialist to capitalist economy led to enormous changes in earnings and employment. In our study a long-horizon descriptive analysis is presented about the major trends, including the last fifteen years of socialism. Education, gender, calendar time, age and vintage effects are...

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...

Regional unemployment and non-participation rates are higher, more disperse, and more stable in Europe than in the U.S. This paper helps understand what may cause this phenomenon. Specifically, it looks at the role of migration in regional differences. I analyze the adjustment mechanisms of...

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...

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...

Using unique data from Hungary, we assess the gap in standardized test scores between Roma and non-Roma students and show that this gap is comparable to the size of the Black-White test score gap in the United States in the 1980s. The ethnic test score gap in Hungary is nearly entirely explained...

This paper documents and decomposes the test score gap between Roma and non-Roma 8th graders in Hungary in 2006. Our data connect national standardized test scores to an individual panel survey with detailed data on ethnicity and family background. The test score gap is approximately one...

We analyze the magnitude and the causes of the low formal employment rate of the Roma in Hungary between 1993 and 2007. The employment rate of the Roma dropped dramatically around 1990. The ethnic employment gap has been 40 percentage points for both men and women and has stayed remarkably...

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...