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...

I identify wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector with the help of a large and sudden public sector wage increase, which raised real compensation by 40 percent in two years, changing the average public wage premium from minus 10 to plus 12 percent. Using a dataset covering about...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization programs. Using a comprehensive dataset that includes all firms inherited from...

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of the early Romanian privatization setup, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from any privatization, we test how politicians select firms into privatization. Using comprehensive data that includes all firms inherited from socialism, we estimate...

With the help of a peculiar institutional feature of early Romanian privatization, when a group of firms was explicitly banned to become private, we test which factors contributed to the selection of firms into long-term state ownership. We find that politicians sheltered large and inefficient...

Using application-level data on successful and rejected applications for the European Union's Structural and Cohesion Funds between 2004 and 2012 in Hungary, we study which grant types are susceptible to political manipulation and how politicians achieve this goal. Using township fixed-effect...

I identify wage spillovers from the public to the corporate sector with the help of a large public sector wage increase, which raised public sector wages by 40 percent in two years time, changing the average public relative wage from a fallback of 10.5 percent to a 12.5 percent premium. The...