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...

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...

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...

The paper attempts to identify causal effects of being enrolled in different educational tracks on student achievement in upper-secondary education in Hungary. Rejected and admitted students are compared who applied to the same school and performed similarly in the previous grade. Average...

There are two fairly widespread economic beliefs in Hungary that we investigate in this study and try to confirm or reject. People mostly see poverty and marginal labour market status as indicators of laziness and own tax evasion behaviour. People believe that the actual income of the poor and...

Public funding drives much of the recent growth of college degree supply in Europe, but few indicators are available to assess its optimal level. In this paper, we investigate an indicator of college skills usage - the fraction of college graduates employed in "college" occupations. Gottschalk...