We study the impact of a large payroll tax cut for older workers in Hungary. Motivated by the predictions of a standard equilibrium job search model, we examine the heterogeneous impact of the policy. Employment increases most at low-productivity firms offering low-wage jobs, which tend to hire...

Following scandals about corruption in foreign aid, and in a political climate that increasingly questions the legitimacy of development assistance, donors are under pressure to control how their funds are spent. At the same time, they also face pressure to trust recipient governments to...

We study the impact of a large payroll tax cut for older workers in Hungary. Motivated by the predictions of a standard equilibrium job search model, we examine the heterogeneous impact of the policy. Employment increases most at low-productivity firms offering low-wage jobs, which tend to hire...

We study the impact of a large payroll tax cut for older workers in Hungary. Motivated by the predictions of a standard equilibrium job search model, we examine the heterogeneous impact of the policy. Employment increases most at low-productivity firms offering low-wage jobs, which tend to hire...

In Hungary, employees could claim sickness insurance benefit within 3 days of job-loss, which would enable them to extend their benefit duration by up to 90 days. The maximum number of days of this 'passive sickness benefit' was halved in 2007. We first investigate whether claiming passive...

We use linked employer-employee data to investigate a large sample of past and future prisoners in Hungary, 2003-2011. We first compare their jobs, focusing on attributes that can reduce the penalty the employer must pay for a mistaken hiring decision. Second, we study if employers insure...

This paper studies the link between gender-biased technological change in the agricultural sector and structural transformation in Norway. After WWII, Norwegian farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace the hand milking of cows, a task typically performed by women. Combining...

We argue that the waning of nepotism in academia bolstered scientific production in pre-industrial Europe. We build a database of families of scholars (1088–1800), measure their scientific output, and develop a general method to disentangle nepotism from inherited human capital—two...