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...

The overall gender wage gap fell from .31 to .15 between 1986 and 2003 following the transition to a free market in Hungary. During the same time period, firms faced increased competition from both new domestic and foreign firms due to the rapid liberalization measures implemented by the...

Built upon data from 11 subsequent waves of yearly wage surveys carried out by the National Labour Center in Hungary from 1992 to 2003, the paper examines, with the use of elementary statistical tools, whether or not earnings fluctuations differed in size among groups of employees with different...

In this paper we seek to provide new empirical evidence on the relative productivities and wages of various worker groups (by gender, age, and education), based on longitudinal matched employer-employee data from Hungary covering 1986-2005. We estimate the productivity and wage gaps from...

Studies of public-private and foreign-domestic wage differentials face difficulties distinguishing ownership effects from correlated characteristics of workers and firms. This paper estimates these ownership differentials using linked employer-employee data (LEED) from Hungary containing 1.35mln...