What is the effect of imports on productivity? To answer this question, we estimate a structural model of producers using product-level import data for a panel of Hungarian manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2001. In our model with heterogenous firms, producers choose to import or purchase...

The paper formalizes the relation between flat taxes and growth when there is a competitive equilibrium tax evasion. A decentralized tax evasion service is supplied by the banking sector. The bank production function follows the financial intermediation microfoundation approach, with deposits as...

The purpose of the paper is to account for the short history of the soft law regulation of corporate conduct on the Budapest Stock Exchange (BSE). In theory, voluntary codes of good governance are expected to improve the deficiences of the existing mechanisms of corporate governance. In case of...

We examine the competitiveness of Hungarian agriculture in relation to that of the EU, based on four indices of revealed comparative advantage, for the period 1992 to 1998. Consistency tests suggest that the indices are less satisfactory as cardinal and ordinal measures, but are useful in...

This paper examines how cooperation in an insurance game depends on risk preferences and the riskiness of income. It considers a dynamic game where commitment is limited, and characterizes the level of cooperation as measured by the reciprocal of the discount factor above which perfect risk...

The real exchange rate is said to be the single most important price in an economy. While we used to think that we knew what explained its movements (e.g., the Balassa-Samuelson effect), the recent much-cited result by Engel (1999) proposes a serious reinterpretation – i.e., nearly 100% of the...

The article analyses the duration of exports of individual products of former communist countries to the enlarged European Union (EU25) employing survival analysis. The results show that the duration of trade differs across EU10 and EU15 markets, for the majority of countries the length of trade...

A complex analytical framework, the Interactive Party state model (IPS), is offered for revealing the structural and dynamic background of opposite processes: first, the development of the communist party as a political entity into a politically monopolized regime and then to a social system;...

Our paper explores, on a theoretical level, the reason for frequent failures of rural development policies and identifies some potential improvements in rural policy making in Europe. Our approach to des/integration concerns actors, resources, institutions, knowledge, the fundamental logic of...

The paper considers two aspects of the targeting of unemployment benefit systems (a) the probability that benefit is received in the population of those unemployed on standard international criteria of search and availability, and (b) the probability in the population of benefit recipients that...