The partial privatization of the US Social Security system was clearly the top economic policy priority for the new Bush administration. While many famous economists, publicists and politicians support, others reject the partial privatization of the Social Security system. The international...

Firms cluster their economic activities to exploit technological and informational spillovers from other firms. Spillovers through the entry of multinational firms can be particularly beneficial to domestic firms because of their technological superiority. Yet, the importance of foreign firm's...

The aim of our study is to spell out and analyse the possibilities of data access, focusing on data that are used as an input of scientific research. We give a brief overview of the current legal background in Hungary. Based on normative economic analysis, we outline the main features of an...

The paper investigates the role of the minimum wage in a competi- tive economy in which there is underreporting of earnings by employed labour. The minimum wage induces higher compliance by some low- productivity workers and transforms a nominally neutral .scal system into a regressive one. A...

This case study is a part of a research project dealing with the post socialist market evolution. Companies with majority foreign ownership are very rare on the market of foreign language services in Hungary. Import competition is negligible on this market as well. One curious feature of this...

The paper presents the results of two surveys on how ownership structure and corporate governance affect corporate performance. The analyses focus on the question whether the differences among the performances of firms can be attributed to the various types of ownership structures and corporate...

The paper explains the observed asymmetric inflation response to value-added tax (VAT) changes in Hungary by calibrating a standard sectoral menu cost model on a new micro-level CPI data set. The model is able to reproduce important moments of the data, and finds that the asymmetry can be...

The paper analyses disparities in local education expenditures at the settlement and school level n Hungary. It is shown that local average income, which is a major element of the local government budget constraint, has a strong impact on school expenditures, especially in towns. This lack of...

The outcome of the economic performance of individuals is utilised in the form of consumption and consequent welfare. Despite this truism, there is relatively little information available on household consumption behaviour in Hungary stemming from investigations based on economic theory. The...

Concentration is a general tendency, which led to strengthening the position of commerce all over the world. One of the consequences are the intensified conflicts between the large- and small-scale production deriving from the differences in volume, selection, quality and price as well as in...