The study analyzes the reliability of corruption risk indicators using Hungarian public procurement data, specifically focusing on EU-funded contracts associated with a cartel case revealed by the Hungarian Competition Authority (HCA) in 2016. The investigation aims to determine whether corruption risk indicators for public procurement contracts related to the identified cartel case (214 contracts) are significantly higher than those for similar contracts in different submarkets. The analysis utilizes data from the Corruption Research Center Budapest database, encompassing Hungarian public procurement information from January 1998 to July 2023, totaling around 340,000 contracts or contract lots. Since the cartel case detected by the HCA was part of the EU-funded KEOP program, covering contracts from 2015 to 2016 in the manufacturing sector, our analysis is limited to EU-subsidized contracts in the manufacturing sector awarded in 2015 and 2016.

Our findings highlight that the corruption risk indicator (single bid), endorsed by the EU Single Market Scoreboard, provides valuable insights for identifying anomalies in public procurement. For the identified cartel contracts, the likelihood of a contract being awarded to a single bidder (without competition) was significantly higher compared to contracts not associated with a cartel case. A similarly robust outcome was observed for the indicator measuring contracts concluded with more than three bids. The probability of contracts with more than three bids was significantly lower for cartel contracts than for others.

The indicator assessing the occurrence of rounded winner prices yielded a significant result for one of the three subsamples, and in another, it was significant only at the 10% level. These results affirm the significance of conducting statistical analyses on contracts and the calculation, as well as in-depth examination, of corruption indicators (single bid, more than three bids, and rounded winner price) to identify anomalies in public procurement.

Using data from 32 European countries for nearly 244 million live births between 1969 and 2021, this paper examines the effects of temperatures on birth rates. The results show that exposure to hot days slightly reduces birth rates five to eight months later, while much stronger negative effects are observed nine to ten months after exposure to hot temperatures. Thereafter, a partial recovery is observed, with slightly increased birth rates. This study also shows that the effect of high-humidity hot days is much stronger than that of hot days with low humidity. Besides, the effect of heatwave days has been found to be more severe than that of hot days that are not preceded by other hot days. This study finds that some adaptation to heat can only be expected in the long run, which suggests that climate change may have a negative impact on the number of live births in the twenty-first century.

In 2013, the Hungarian government cut the school leaving age from 18 to 16. We study the impact of this unique reform on the country’s sizeable Roma minority using census data on the universe of 17-year-olds in 2011 and a 10 percent random sample in 2016. School attendance fell by more than 20 percentage points among Roma youth as opposed to less than 6 points with their non-Roma counterparts. Roma’s post-reform drawbacks in school enrolment were predominantly explained by their family background, neighborhood characteristics, and, much less importantly, below-average school performance. Changes in local employment prospects had no remarkable impact on the post-reform ethnic gap. More stringent selection and self-selection by social status and school performance (rather than ethnicity) nevertheless affected the Roma minority disproportionally, with close to 30 percent of their 17-year-old children being out of education, training, and employment three years after the reform.

The aim of this paper is to quantify how much of the initial wage differentials of young workers is explained by the secondary school they attended, and to disentangle the (descriptive) channels contributing to these differences. The analysis is based on the HUN-REN CERS Admin3 database, taking advantage of the fact that for some cohorts, young people’s secondary schooling (and students’ school standardized mathematics test scores) and wage outcomes at their early career can be observed simultaneously. Using wage decomposition methods, we separate the channels of firm and occupational selection from the direct returns to further education. Our analysis suggests that about 10 percent of the total wage dispersion of young people aged 18-25 (and already working) is generated at the school level. This also implies that the correlation between the wages of any two students of the same school is 0.1. Another novelty of the paper is that we show that a substantial part of these correlations are due to occupational and workplace selection (e.g. students from a given school type are systematically more likely to go on to well-paid jobs). If we remove these selection effects, the effect of schools on wage dispersion, the correlation between the latent skills of students, shrinks to 4 percent. Finally, we also compare schools of different quality based on different school characteristics (e.g. average test scores), which allows us to further stress the importance of the selection channels.

Good management practices are important determinants of firm success. It is unclear, however, to what extent pro-management policies can shape aggregate outcomes. We use data on corporations and their top managers in Hungary during and after its post-communist transition to document a number of salient patterns. First, the number of managers is low under communism when most employment is in large conglomerates. After the transition to capitalism, the number of managers increased sharply. Second, economics and business degrees became more popular with capitalist transition. Third, newly entering managers tended to run smaller firms than incumbent managers. We build a dynamic equilibrium model to explain these facts. In the model, the number and average quality of managers react to schooling and career choice. We use the model to evaluate hypothetical policies aiming to improve aggregate productivity through management education and corporate liberalization. Our results suggest that variations in the supply of good managers are important to understand the success of management interventions.