Firms may benefit from proximity to each other due to the existence of several externalities. The productivity premia of firms located in agglomerated regions an be attributed to savings and gains from external economies. However, the capacity to absorb information may depend on activities of...

In Hungary, the health status of working age men is extremely bad in comparison with both the developed market economies and the neighboring transition countries. The study based on data between 1960 and 2004 investigates the health status of population in Hungary and Austria by...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between productivity growth and firm dynamics using firm-level data between 1992 and 2006. Theories emphasising firm-level heterogeneity show that industry-level productivity may not only increase as a consequence of increasing within-firm...

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...

This paper assesses the importance for structural transformation of three features of sectoral technology: labor-augmenting technological progress, capital intensity, and substitutability between capital and labor. We estimate CES production functions for agriculture, manufacturing, and services...

In this study standard Mincer earnings equations are estimated using both ordinary least squares (OLS) and quantile regression in order to give a comprehensive picture of the returns to education in Germany and Hungary for the year 2000. To make the cross-country comparison of the returns to...

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...

This study estimates the expected long-term budgetary benefits to investing into Roma education in Hungary. By budgetary benefits we mean the direct financial benefits to the national budget. The main idea is that investing extra public money into Roma education would pay off even in fiscal...