We analyse the timing, magnitude and income dependence of pharmaceutical panic buying around the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary. We use district-level monthly and daily administrative data on detailed categories of pharmaceutical purchases, merge them to income statistics and estimate multilevel panel models. Our main results are as follows. First, the days of therapy (DOT) of pharmaceutical purchases increased by more than 30% in March 2020, when major lockdown measures were announced. This pattern holds for almost all categories of pharmaceuticals. Second, shortly after the panic reactions, the aggregate amount of pharmaceutical purchases returned to their pre-shock levels, however, the frequency of pharmacy visits decreased. Third, the panic buying reaction was significantly stronger in richer geographical areas, where – according to the daily data – people also reacted earlier to the pandemic-related news. Overall, the results suggest that panic buying of pharmaceuticals can have detrimental effects on vulnerable populations.

Tanulmányunkban a KSH munkaerő-felmérése és havi teljesítménystatisztikája segítségével vizsgáljuk a koronavírus járvány első hullámának azonnali gazdasági hatásait. A mikroadatok vizsgálata lehetővé teszi, hogy az aggregált statisztikáknál részletesebben mérjük fel a gazdasági visszaesés által okozott károkat. Az eredmények a 2008-2009-esnél is súlyosabb visszaesésre és az egyenlőtlenség növekedésére utalnak. A diplomások az átlagnál jobban vészelték át a válságot: körükben kisebb volt az állásvesztés valószínűsége, nagyobb arányban tértek át távmunkára és az őt alkalmazó cégek árbevétele is kevesebbet esett. A külföldi tulajdonú exportáló vállalatok árbevétele az átlagosnál nagyobbat zuhant márciusban, de nyárra már megközelítette a kora tavaszi értékét. Ezzel szemben a magyar tulajdonú cégeknél a visszaesés lassabb, de tartósabb volt.

Outcomes related to the wellbeing of students are increasingly being recognized as valuable objectives for education systems. In this study, we ask if high-stakes testing affects school-related stress among students and if there are gender differences in these effects.

We combine macro-level data on high-stakes testing with survey data on more than 300,000 students aged 10-16 years in 31 European countries, from three waves (2002, 2006 and 2010) of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study. With variation in high-stakes testing across countries, years and grade levels, we use a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences (DD) design for identification of causal effects.

We find that high-stakes testing increases self-reported school-related stress by almost 10 % of a standard deviation. This is primarily driven by a strong effect for girls, meaning that high-stakes testing increases the gender gap in school-related stress. The results are robust to a range of sensitivity analyses.

Ebben a tanulmányban azt vizsgáljuk két reprezentatív felmérés segítségével, hogy egyéni szinten hogyan viszonyul egymáshoz a versengés és az együttműködés, illetve ezek hogyan függnek össze a végzettséggel. Az első eredményünk az, hogy a versengés és az együttműködés pozitívan és szignifikánsan korrelál, még akkor is, ha figyelembe vesszük a válaszadó korát, nemét, a lakhelyének településtípusát és a régióját. Másrészt azt találjuk, hogy a versengés és az együttműködés nemlineárisan függ össze a végzettséggel. Magasabb fokú versengés és együttműködés több oktatásban töltött évvel jár együtt, de egyre csökkenő mértékben. Továbbá, a túl magas együttműködés és versengési értékkel a végzettség alacsonyabb szintje jár együtt.

Typically economists arguing for flexible (or variable) retirement age, but they rely on steady state analysis.  In this paper we consider the replacement of a mandatory retirement system with a flexible one in real time. We show that even if early retirement is duly punished, diminishing the effective retirement age by 1 year raises the first year’s and the total expenditures during transition by 8% and  70% of the original annual expenditure, respectively.

ÖSSZEFOGLALÓ

Kutatásunk a magyarországi gyerekek egészségi állapotában fennálló társadalmi különbségeket vizsgálja a 2010-es években. Az elemzések alapját számos adminisztratív adatbázis és survey jellegű információforrás adja. Beszámolónk összegyűjti, egységes statisztikai keretbe rendezi a rendelkezésre álló mikroszintű adatok többségét, és a laikus közvélemény számára is követhető formában értelmezi őket. A vizsgálatunk rámutat arra, hogy gyermekek egészsége milyen nagy mértékben függ össze azzal, hogy milyen társadalmi közegbe születtek, hogy milyen életkörülmények és jövedelmi viszonyok között élnek, illetve hogy milyen viselkedési sajátosságokkal rendelkeznek ők maguk és a szüleik.

Using data from the COVID-19 questionnaire of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we investigate the time patterns of precautionary health behaviours of individuals aged 50 and above during the summer of 2020, an easing phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. We also examine how these health behaviours differ by the presence of chronic conditions such as hypertension, high cholesterol level, heart disease, diabetes or chronic bronchitis, which can be considered as risk factors for COVID-19. Our results suggest that while on average, people became less precautious during our analysed time period, this is less so for those who are at higher risk. We also document large regional differences in precautionary health behaviours and show that higher risk individuals are on average more cautious in all regions. We conclude that people adjusted their health behaviours in line with the generally understood risk of the COVID-19 disease. At the same time, our results also point out divergences in the level of willingness to take different precautionary steps.

We present a novel algorithm to rank smaller academic entities such as university departments or research groups within a research discipline. The Weighted Top Candidate (WTC) algorithm is a generalisation of an expert identification method. The axiomatic characterisation of WTC shows why it is especially suitable for scientometric purposes. The key axiom is stability — the selected institutions support each other’s membership. The WTC algorithm, upon receiving an institution citation matrix, produces a list of institutions that can be deemed experts of the field. With a parameter we can adjust how exclusive our list should be. By completely relaxing the parameter, we obtain the largest stable set — academic entities that can qualify as experts under the mildest conditions. With a strict setup, we obtain a short list of the absolute elite. We demonstrate the algorithm on a citation database compiled from game theoretic literature published between 2008–2017. By plotting the size of the stable sets with respect to exclusiveness, we can obtain an overview of the competitiveness of the field. The diagram hints at how difficult it is for an institution to improve its position.

We study the impact of the gender composition of a scoreboard on the persistence and performance of players in an online game. Players were randomly selected into eight groups, defined along two dimensions: they saw high or average scores on a scoreboard (score level), and within each of these, they saw either 3 male, 2 male and one female, 1 male and 2 female, or 3 female names associated with the scores (gender composition). Based on 1140 participants, we find that males are generally less responsive to performance information on other participants. Compared to the baseline of all male names on the scoreboard, females play fewer games when they see only female names, but more games when they see mixed gender names with high scores. Their performance (best score) increases significantly when they see at least one female name and high scores. This result is in line with the importance of female-specific reference points – or role models – in encouraging females’ participation and higher performance in competitive settings. It supports the use of policies aimed at providing these, such as the introduction of female role models and the public acknowledgement of high performing females.

Evidence of the relationship between temperature during pregnancy and human embryo mortality is limited. Most importantly, the literature lacks causal estimations and studies on early pregnancy losses. Here, we estimate the impact of early pregnancy temperature exposure on the clinically unobserved pregnancy loss rate. We use administrative data of clinically observed pregnancies from more than three decades for Hungary. We apply an empirical approach that allows us to infer the impact of temperature on the clinically unobserved pregnancy loss rate from the estimated effects on the clinically observed conception rate. The results show that exposure to hot temperatures during the first few weeks after the conception week increases the clinically unobserved pregnancy loss rate, whereas exposure to colder temperatures seems to decrease it. Importantly, the temperature-induced changes represent changes in the total number of pregnancy losses rather than a compositional change between clinically observed and clinically unobserved pregnancy losses.

In this study, we estimate unadjusted and adjusted gender gap in time preference, risk attitudes, altruism, trust, trustworthiness, cooperation and competitiveness using data on 1088 high-school students from 53 classes. These data, collected by running incentivized experiments in Hungarian classrooms, are linked to an administrative data source on the students’ standardized test scores, grades and family background. We find that after taking into account class fixed effects, females are significantly more altruistic (both with classmates and schoolmates), but are less present-biased, less risk tolerant, less trusting, less trustworthy and less competitive than males. At the same time we do not observe significant gender differences in patience, time inconsistency and cooperation at the 5% significance level. We also show that these initial gender differences do not change even if we control for age, family background, cognitive skills and school grades in a regression framework. Moreover, the gender gap also remains in all but one of these preferences even if we control for the other preference domains, suggesting that only risk preferences are confounded by the other preferences, at least as the gender gap in these preferences is concerned.

There is significant heterogeneity in actual skill use within occupations even though occupations are differentiated by the tasks workers should perform during work. Using data on 12 countries which are available both in the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies survey and International Social Survey Program, we show that women use their cognitive skills less than men even within the same occupation. The gap in skill intensity cannot be explained by differences in worker characteristics or in cognitive skills. Instead, we show that living in a partnership significantly increases the skill use of men compared with women. We argue that having a partner affects skill use through time allocation as the gender penalty of partnered women is halved once we control for working hours and hours spent on housework. Finally, we do not find evidence of workplace discrimination against women.