The idea of a job guarantee (JG) to tackle unemployment has become popular again over recent years. Critics often point to the fiscal costs and the macroeconomic impact of a government financing full employment. In this paper, we analyse the fiscal costs of a JG for long-term unemployed people...

This study investigates the crowding out effect among old and young workers in the Hungarian public sector, using job-level data. The analysis improves upon analyses based on aggregate data by considering the levels of employment for various labour types and the employment opportunities and...

This paper reviews what we currently know about the benefits and costs of different varieties of a "living wage": a local government requirement, now adopted by over 50 local governments, for wages above the federal minimum imposed on employers with some financial link to the local government....

Using a large and unexpected public wage increase in Hungary which changed the public wage premium in 2002 from -17 to +7.5 percent from one month to the next, I study wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector. I proxy the exposure of corporate workers to the public sector with the...

This paper analyses recruitment practices to Samhall, a state-owned company that provides sheltered employment for individuals with severe work disabilities. Besides providing employment for disabled workers and rehabilitating them to employment outside Samhall, the company is expected to...

This paper analyses recruitment practices to Samhall, a state-owned company that provides sheltered employment for individuals with severe work disabilities. Besides providing employment for disabled workers and rehabilitating them to employment outside Samhall, the company is expected to...

Using a representative survey combined with register data on long-term labour market outcomes, this paper examines how personality traits predict sorting into public and private sector employment among prime working-age individuals. To gain deeper insights into the dynamic dimensions of the...

Much of the political economy analysis of reform focuses on the conflict of interest between groups that stand to gain or lose from the competing policy proposals. In reality, there is also a lot of disagreement about the working of the policy: in addition to conflicting interests, conflicting...

Politicians can use the public sector to give jobs to cronies, at the expense of the efficiency of those organisations and general welfare. Motivated by a simple model of cronyism that predicts spikes in appointments to state-owned firms near elections, we regress 1980-2008 monthly hirings...

This study investigates the crowding out effect among old and young workers in the Hungarian public sector, using job-level data. The analysis improves upon analyses based on aggregate data by considering the levels of employment for various labour types and the employment opportunities and...