We look at the effect of school starting age on standardized test scores using data covering all grade four and grade eight students in Hungary. Instrumental variables estimates of the local average treatment effect suggest that children generally gain from starting school one year later and the...

We study the entry to formal employment and earnings of a large sample of convicts released from Hungarian prisons in 2002-2008. We identify the effect of the prison service on post-release careers by exploiting differences in the timing of incarceration, on the one hand, and estimating fixed...

The paper addresses the question why Hungarian state enterprises cut employment by two-digit percentages in the last years of state socialism. It argues that job destruction was a result of changing incentives and liberties (harder budget constraint, stronger insider power, loosening political...

The paper analyses regional relative wages using individual and firmlevel data from Hungary 1986-96. In regions hit hard by the transition shock labour costs fell substantially; the estimated elasticities of wages with respect to regional unemployment were in a range typical of mature market...

Millions of East-Europeans started businesses during the transformational recession but, according to a wide-spread interpretation, many of them did so only temporarily and 'unwillingly' under the threat of unemployment. The paper looks at the relevance of the 'disguised unemployment approach to...

The substantial rise of wage inequality in Central and Eastern Europe has attracted the attention of sociologists, concerned with social equity, and economists for whom it indicated the growing differentiation and restructuring of relative prices on the labour market. This research wanted to...

At the eve of 1999 the Hungarian government introduced radical reforms including a further cut of UI benefits and the abolishment of UA for benefit exhausters. The reforms were based on the assumption that the generosity of unemployment benefits combined with the availability of informal jobs...

The paper analyses the evolution of relative wages using individual wage data, and the contribution of skills to productivity using firmlevel information from Hungary, 1986-99. Its main conclusion is that skills obsolescence was, and still is, an important aspect of postcommunist transition. The...

The paper analyses changes in the demand for unskilled, young skilled, and older skilled workers during the post-communist transition in Hungary. Systems of cost share equations derived from the translog cost function are estimated for cross-sections of large firms observed in the period...

The effect of minimum wages on employment has been a matter of debate for more than a decade. Apart from a few cases (Puerto Rico, Indonesia, Columbia) the empirical works analysed the aftermaths of minor increases in the minimum wage, and yielded mixed results. Hungary 2000-2002 provides a...