In 2013, the Hungarian government cut the school leaving age from 18 to 16. We study the impact of this unique reform on the country's sizeable Roma minority using census data on the universe of 17-year-olds in 2011 and a 10 percent random sample in 2016. School attendance fell by more than 20...

This paper investigates the role of cognitive skills in the return to higher education (HE) in Hungary. It makes use of linked Hungarian administrative data, which contains labor market and educational information of about 50 percent of the Hungarian population, for the period of 2003 and 2017...

The Databank of the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies has established Admin3, the third round of the Panel of Administrative Data. The data source contains administrative data of the National Health Insurance Fund Administration, the Hungarian State Treasury, the National Tax and Customs...

The paper looks at how the distribution of jobs by complexity and firms' willingness to hire low educated labor for jobs of different complexity contribute to unskilled employment in Norway, Italy and Hungary. In search of how unqualified workers can attend complex jobs, it compares their...

Transition has involved major job destruction and creation. This paper examines the skill content of these changes using a detailed three country firm survey. It shows that transition has exerted a strong bias against unskilled labour who have lost employment disproportionately. Moreover, job...

We look at the effect of school starting age on standardized test scores using data covering all grade four and grade eight students in Hungary. Instrumental variables estimates of the local average treatment effect suggest that children generally gain from starting school one year later and the...

We study the entry to formal employment and earnings of a large sample of convicts released from Hungarian prisons in 2002-2008. We identify the effect of the prison service on post-release careers by exploiting differences in the timing of incarceration, on the one hand, and estimating fixed...

The paper addresses the question why Hungarian state enterprises cut employment by two-digit percentages in the last years of state socialism. It argues that job destruction was a result of changing incentives and liberties (harder budget constraint, stronger insider power, loosening political...

The paper analyses regional relative wages using individual and firmlevel data from Hungary 1986-96. In regions hit hard by the transition shock labour costs fell substantially; the estimated elasticities of wages with respect to regional unemployment were in a range typical of mature market...

Millions of East-Europeans started businesses during the transformational recession but, according to a wide-spread interpretation, many of them did so only temporarily and 'unwillingly' under the threat of unemployment. The paper looks at the relevance of the 'disguised unemployment approach to...