This paper reports the results of a Blinder-Oaxaca style decomposition analysis on Hungarian matched employer-employee data to study the gender pay-gap. We carry out the decomposition by Random Forest regressions. The raw gap in our horizon (2008-2016) is increasing, but we find that the wage structure effects are rather stable, thus the rise in the gap is due to the disappearance of the formerly negative composition effects. Graphical analysis sheds light on interesting non-linear relationships; some of them can be readily interpreted by the previous literature. A Classification and Regression Tree analysis suggests that complicated interaction patterns exist in the data. We identify segments of the Hungarian labour market that are most and least exposed to gender-dependent wage determination. Our findings lend support to the idea that an important part of the gender wage gap is attributable to monopsonistic competition with gender-dependent supply elasticities.

Exploiting a change in reporting defaults and the implied audit threat in Hungary, we demonstrate that a substantial portion of employees and the self-employed reporting to earn the minimum wage have much higher earnings in reality. This can be seen from their sharp but temporary jump to the new reporting default, a twofold increase in reported earnings. Consistent with misreporting, the response is concentrated both spatially and by employer and the distribution of covariates around the threshold exhibits anomalies. Requiring individuals reporting to earn the minimum wage to pay higher taxes or ask for explicit exceptions increases reported earnings for some and decreases formal employment for others, suggesting a trade-off for taxation. We formalize the empirical findings in a model of minimum wage taxation where earnings underreporting around the minimum wage would justify a move towards higher taxation of those earnings, more aligned with a prevalent international practice.

In this paper we show experimentally that conditional cooperation, a phenomenon described in the private provision of public goods, is also present in group contests, where participants’ contributions to their group performance partially determines if they overcome a rival group. This environment allows us to identify new determinants of conditional cooperation. We observe conditional cooperation in successful groups and in groups where members contribute more than rivals (even if they lose), but it vanishes in those groups that lose the contest due to low group performance. A random-effect linear panel regression analysis with an extensive set of controls confirms the findings.

Ez a tanulmány bemutatja a közgazdaságtudományi kutatói szakma területén tapasztalható nemek közötti egyenlőtlenségeket három visegrádi ország vonatkozásában. A foglalkoztatottság tekintetében a nemek közötti eltérés mértéke az élvonalba tartozó intézményekben megegyezik az Egyesült Államokban és más nyugati országokban tapasztalt mértékkel. A kevésbé előkelő helyre rangsorolt intézményekben azonban ez a különbség kisebb, sőt némely esetben a nők javára fordul át. Amennyiben az intézményi korlátok hoznak létre ilyen mintát – erre utal a korábbi szakirodalom – a tudományos intézmények befogadóbbá tételével potenciálisan megszüntethetőek lennének az élvonalba tartozó intézményekben tapasztalt különbségek. Tanulmányunkban néhány gyakorlati javaslatot vitatunk meg.

This paper shows descriptive evidence about the gender disparities in economics profession in three Visegrad countries. We show that the employment gender gap in highly ranked institutions is in par with the gap found in the United States and in other Western countries. However, the gap is smaller and sometimes even reversed at lower ranked institutions. To the extent that these patterns are due to institutional constraints – as suggested by previous literature – making academia more inclusive would have a potential to close the gap in higher ranked institutions. Some practical suggestions are discussed.

2013-ban széleskörű centralizációs folyamat indult el a magyar közoktatásban, melynek során minden, addig önkormányzati fenntartásban lévő iskola egy állami intézményfenntartó központhoz került. A tanulmány célja, hogy megvizsgálja ennek a centralizációs folyamatnak a diákok tesztpontszámaira gyakorolt hatását mind általános iskolai, mind pedig középiskolai szinten. További cél ezeknek a hatásoknak a szintén 2013-ban indult szakképzési reform hatásaitól való elkülönítése. Az elemzés különbségek különbsége módszert és hozzáadott érték modelleket használ fixhatásokkal keverve. Arra az eredményre jut, hogy 6. és 8. évfolyamon nem volt kimutatható hatása a centralizációnak, sem az általános iskolai, sem pedig a szerkezetváltó gimnáziumi képzésekben. Még 10. évfolyamon sem mutatható ki a 2013-at követő teljes időszakra vonatkozó átlagos hatás, csak 2015-ben és ’17-ben figyelhető meg átmeneti, 0,05 szórásegységnyi negatív centralizációs hatás a tesztpontszámokra. A centralizáció és a szakképzési reform hatásainak elkülönítését célzó modell alapján azonban valószínűsíthető, hogy ezek az átmeneti hatások is elsősorban a reform negatív hatásaira vezethetők vissza. Utóbbi egy szórásegység 9-16%-ával csökkentette a szakközépiskolások pontszámait.

This paper provides a general equilibrium model of income tax evasion. As functions of the share of income reported, the paper contributes an analytic derivation of the tax elasticity of taxable income, the welfare cost of the tax, and government revenue as a percent of output. It shows how an increase in the tax rate causes the tax elasticity and welfare cost to increase in magnitude by more than with zero evasion. Keeping constant the ratio of income tax revenue to output, as shown to be consistent with certain US evidence, a rising productivity of the goods sector induces less evasion and thereby allows tax rate reduction. The paper derives conditions for a stable share of income tax revenue in output with dependence upon the tax elasticity of reporting income. Examples are provided with less and more productive economies in terms of the tax elasticity of reported income, the welfare cost of taxation and the tax revenue as a percent of output, with sensitivity analysis with respect to leisure preference and goods productivity. Discussion focuses on how the tax evasion analysis may help explain such fiscal tax policy as the postwar US income tax rate reductions with discussion of tax acts and government fiscal multipliers. Fiscal policy with tax evasion included shows how tax rate reduction induces less tax evasion, a lower welfare cost of taxation, and makes for a stable income tax share of output.

In this paper, we scrutinize in the transforming party-state system of China the subtle dynamics of enterprise adaptation to state interventions, which react to hardening external and internal constraints. We use a comparative systemic framework that interprets adaptation in the context of system dynamics and transformation (Csanádi, 2006). We analyze a firm-level database of the Chinese industry from 1998 to 2013 with more than 3.8 million entities. Enterprise sensitivity and adaptation is measured by entries and exits. Taking a systemic approach, we distinguish enterprises that belong to either the party-state network or to the market as two economic sub-spheres defined by our analytical framework. Using the dynamics of entries and exits of industrial enterprises in each of these two spheres, we measure their expansion and contraction as well as that of the speed of both. Different speed allows for the quantification of the dynamics of economic transformation. Our results reveal that increasing frequency of entries and exits, both within and between the two spheres, are interconnected with state interventions reacting to booming and cooling periods of system-specific overinvestment and hardening and softening external constraints (Csanádi, 2015; Csanádi and Gyuris, forthcoming).

Similarly, we reveal a strong connection between enterprise entries and exits and the occasional changes in the acceleration and slowdown of transformation dynamics through alternating periods of retreat and expansion of the network. We confirm the retreat of the network between 1998 and 2009 in terms of number of enterprises, employment, and sales revenues. However, we find that state interventions reacting to the 2008-2009 global crisis as well as Xi Jinping’s anticorruption campaign in 2012-2013 halted the retreat of the network in terms of various statistical indicators. Interventions also changed the moderate annual decline of state-owned capital share among enterprises belonging to the network (a clear trend until 2008), for they led to a “hidden expansion” of the state ownership through a relatively fast increase of its capital share from the early 2010s. Thus, transformation is not continuous, as halts and slowdowns during this process occur in major periods of state intervention.

Neither is the advancement of transformation uniform. Regarding the number, employment, and sales revenue of enterprises, the retreat of the network and the expansion of the market sphere have substantially been more advanced than in case of the allocation of resources, which is selective and biased towards state-owned and large enterprises (Csanádi, 1997; Csanádi and Liu, 2012). These along with the resulting politically rational economic behavior of enterprises are essential characteristics of the party-state system.

We scrutinize the systemic consequences of state intervention triggered by external shocks in the transforming Chinese economy before and after the global crisis. We interpret investment dynamics using a comparative party-state model concept framework. We identify the overinvestment as an outcome of the dynamics of party-state power formed by relations of dependence and interest promotion between party, state and economic decision-makers and of emerging structural motivations inside of this network. Due to the structural and operational characteristics of the party-state network, which are self-similar in time, space and at various aggregation levels, overinvestment and economic overheating can also be detected on the provincial level. This local phenomena is intensified by the specific decentralized pattern of power distribution of the Chinese party-state system. Thus, local intensity of overheating is further increased by major state interventions reacting to external shocks. Overheating is further amplified during economic transformation by market actors adapting to network priorities. Investment swings in both heating and cooling periods hide different forms of behavior in enterprises with different ownership types.

Using eight waves of the European Social Survey, we analysed how the local unemployment rate influences the well-being disadvantages of the unemployed. We estimate region fixed effects and slopes models that, unlike the standard region fixed effects approach, provide an unbiased estimate of the cross-level interaction term (the term between being unemployed and the unemployment rate). We find that the satisfaction of unemployed people (relative to employed people) is lower when the unemployment rate is higher. The results are similar for the depression scores, but the differences are smaller and insignificant regarding the happiness scores. Our results do not support the “social norm of unemployment” hypothesis that states that the negative impacts of unemployment are smaller if the unemployment rate is higher. In contrast, these results are in line with the argument that worse re-employment perspectives in high-unemployment regions may be particularly harmful to unemployed people. We note that these results do not contradict the claim that, in regions with a weaker social norm to work, unemployed people may be more satisfied. Instead, the results suggest that the unemployment rate is not a good proxy for the social norm to work.

Social connections that reach distant places are advantageous for individuals and firms by providing access to new skills and knowledge. However, systematic evidence on how firms work up global knowledge access is still missing. In this paper, we analyse how global work connections relate to differences in the skill composition of employees within companies. We gather survey data from 10% of workers in a local industry in Sweden and complement this with digital trace data to map co-worker networks and skill composition. This unique combination of data and features allows us to quantify global connections of employees and measure the degree of skill-similarity and skill-relatedness to co-workers. We find that the workers with extensive local networks typically have related skills to others in the region and to their co-workers. Workers with more global ties typically bring in less related skills to the region. These results provide new insights to the composition of skills within knowledge intensive firms by connecting the geography of networks contacts to the diversity of skills accessible through them.

The rollout of fifth generation mobile networks is progressing around the world, but 5G looks especially expensive compared to previous generations. Network sharing between two or more mobile operators is an obvious way to attain significant cost savings, but may also raise competition concerns. This paper first distinguishes between early and mature 5G, and then discusses the expected changes mature 5G brings to the assessment of active mobile network sharing agreements from a competition policy point of view. We focus on the three main concerns where 5G may bring the most significant changes in the evaluation compared to 4G: service differentiation, cost commonality between the parties and the parties’ ability and incentives to grant access to critical inputs to downstream competitors. For each of these concerns, we show that they are not easy to substantiate and in some cases the concerns may even become less grave than under 4G.