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.

We analyze the impact of in utero temperature exposure on the birth weight and prevalence of low birth weight using administrative data on singleton live births conceived between 2000 and 2016 in Hungary. We find that exposure to high temperatures during pregnancy decreases birth weight, but its impact on the probability of low birth weight is weaker. Exposure to one additional hot day (mean temperature >25°C) during the gestation period reduces birth weight by 0.5 grams. The second and third trimesters appear to be slightly more sensitive to temperature exposure than the first trimester. We project that climate change will decrease birth weight and increase the prevalence of low birth weight by the mid-21st century. The projected impacts are the strongest for newborns conceived during the winter and spring months.

We examine the long-term consequences of restricted access to abortion following a change in the Hungarian abortion law in 1974. Due to a change that restricted access to legal abortions, the number of induced abortions decreased from 169,650 to 102,022 between 1973 and 1974, whereas the number of live births increased from 156,224 to 186,288. We analyze the effects on the adult outcomes of the affected newborns (educational attainment, labor market participation, teen fertility). We use matched large-scale, individual-level administrative datasets of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (population census 2011; live birth register), and we estimate the effects by comparing children born within a short timespan around the law change. We apply a difference-in-differences approach, building on the special rules of the new law that, despite the severe restriction, still made abortion permissible for selected groups of women. We control for the compositional change in the population of parents, rule out the effect of (unobserved) time trends and other potential behavioral responses to the law change, and draw causal inferences. We find that restricted access to abortion had, on average, a negative impact on the socioeconomic outcomes of the affected children. Children born after the law change have had worse educational outcomes, a greater likelihood of being unemployed at age 37, and a higher probability of being a teen parent.

Automation risk of workers prevails less in large cities compared to small cities, but little is known about the drivers of this emerging urban phenomenon. We examine the role of cities on changes in automation risk through individual careers of workers by separating labour mobility to a city from labour mobility within a city. Applying panel data representing all Swedish workers from 2005 to 2013 we provide new evidence that working in, or moving to, metropolitan areas lower automation risk of workers. We find that high-skilled workers enjoy dynamic occupation upgrades in cities and benefit from accumulating experience in the urban labour market, while low-skilled workers experience a single static upgrade when moving to a city.

Dolgozatunkban adminisztratív járulékadatok segítségével vizsgáljuk a sorkatonaságban való részvétel bérekre gyakorolt hatását. Elemzésünkben különbségek-különbsége módszerrel vizsgáltuk, hogy változik a 2003-ban és 2004-ben bevonuló sorkatonák bére a be nem vonuló munkatársaikhoz képest. A sorkatonák bevonulás előtt 20 százalékkal kevesebbet kerestek, mint a hasonló tulajdonságokkal rendelkező ám be nem vonuló munkavállalók. A sorkatonaság után ez a bérhátrány kb. 3 százalékos bérelőnnyé változik. Mivel a sorkatonaság csak 6 hónapig tartott, ezért nem gondoljuk, hogy a gyors bérnövekedés csak a termelékenység növekedése miatt következett be. A legvalószínűbb magyarázat az, hogy cégek diszkriminálták a sorkatonákat bevonulás előtt, vagy pedig a cégek és a későbbi sorkatonák képességei nem illettek össze.

Automation risk of workers prevails less in large cities compared to small cities, but little is known about the drivers of this emerging urban phenomenon. We examine the role of cities on changes in automation risk through individual careers of workers by separating labour mobility to a city from labour mobility within a city. Applying panel data representing all Swedish workers from 2005 to 2013 we provide new evidence that working in, or moving to, metropolitan areas lower automation risk of workers. We find that high-skilled workers enjoy dynamic occupation upgrades in cities and benefit from accumulating experience in the urban labour market, while low-skilled workers experience a single static upgrade when moving to a city.

We examine regional differences in diabetes within Europe, and relate them to variations in socio-economic conditions, comorbidities, health behaviour and diabetes management. Using SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) data, first, we estimate multivariate regressions, where the outcome variables are diabetes prevalence, diabetes incidence, and weight loss due to diet as an indicator of management. Second, we study the heterogeneous impact of the risk factors on the regional differences in incidence with causal random forests.

Compared to Western Europe, the transition odds to diabetes is 2.3-fold in Southern and 2.7-fold in Eastern Europe, which decreases to 2.0 and 2.1 after adjusting for individual characteristics. The remaining differences are explained by country-specific healthcare indicators. Based on the causal forest approach, the adjusted East-West difference is essentially zero for the lowest risk groups (tertiary education, no hypertension, no overweight) and increases substantially with these risk factors, but the South-West difference is much less heterogeneous. The prevalence of diet-related weight loss around the time of diagnosis also exhibits regional variation. The results suggest that more emphasis should be put on diabetes prevention among high-risk individuals in Eastern Europe.

The Covid-19 epidemic highlighted the significance of externalities: contacts with other people do not only affect our chances of getting infected but also our entire network.

We introduce a model for coalitional network stability in networks with widespread externalities. The network function form generalises the partition function form of cooperative games in allowing the network structure to be taken into account. The recursive core for network function form games generalises the recursive core for such environments and its properties also rhyme with the corresponding inclusion properties of the optimistic and pessimistic recursive cores and can be seen as a modification of pairwise stability to a coalitional setting where the involvement of more players allows for the — partial — internalisation of the externalities, but we also allow residual players to endogenously respond to any externalities that may affect them. We present two simple examples to illustrate positive and negative externalities. The first is of a favour network and show that the core is nonempty when players must pay transfers to intermediaries; this simple setting also models economic situations such as airline networks. The second models social contacts during an epidemic and finds social bubbles as the solution.

The Young Physicists Tournament is an established team-oriented scientific competition between high school students from 37 countries on 5 continents. The competition consists of scientific discussions called Fights. Three or four teams participate in each Fight, each of whom presents a problem while rotating the roles of Presenter, Opponent, Reviewer, and Observer among them.

The rules of a few countries require that each team announce in advance 3 problems they will present at the national tournament. The task of the organizers is to choose the composition of Fights in such a way that each team presents each of its chosen problems exactly once and within a single Fight no problem is presented more than once. Besides formalizing these feasibility conditions, in this paper we formulate several additional fairness conditions for tournament schedules. We show that the fulfillment of some of them can be ensured by constructing suitable edge colorings in bipartite graphs. To find fair schedules, we propose integer linear programs and test them on real as well as randomly generated data.

We develop a new model of social innovation (SI) inspired by the multi-channel interactive learning model of business innovation. As opposed to the linear models of innovation, this model does not identify ‘stages’ of business innovation. Rather, it stresses that innovation is an interactive process, in which collaboration among various partners are crucial, as they possess different types of knowledge, all indispensable for successful innovation activities.

Having considered numerous definitions of SI, first we propose a new one, then adapt the multi-channel interactive learning model to SI. To do so, we identify the major actors in an SI process, their activities, interactions, modes of (co-)producing, disseminating and utilising knowledge. We also consider the micro and macro environment of a given SI.

We illustrate the analytical relevance of the proposed model by considering three real-life cases. The model can assist SI policy-makers, policy analysts, as well as practitioners when devising, implementing or assessing SI.

A tanulmányban 38-41 európai ország lakosságának halálozásában tapasztalt eltérésekkel és ezek magyarázatával foglalkozom. Összehasonlítom a korai (0-64 éves kor)  és az időskori (65 év felett)  mortalitási rátákat alakító tényezőket betegség-csoportonként és nemek szerint a 2009. évre. Egy szűkebb mintán kitérek az elkerülhető (ezen belül a megelőzhető és kezelhető) betegségekből adódó halálozási különbségekre a 2015. évre.

Az alkalmazott modell az országok lakosságának életkörülményeit és életmódját veszi számításba, így az egy főre jutó GDP-t, a földrajzi elhelyezkedést, a légszennyezettséget, a népesség képzettségét, a dohányzási és égetettszesz fogyasztási szokásokat, valamint az egészségügyi kiadásokat.

A legmeghökkentőbb eredmény a légszennyezettség hatásával kapcsolatos: a tüdőrák esetében a 65 év alatti férfiaknál ennek mortalitást magyarázó, kiemelkedően magas súlya szinte megegyezik a leginkább ismert kockázati tényezőjével, a dohányzáséval; sőt, az időseknél már jelentős a különbség a légszennyezettség „javára”.