We study the impact of delayed school entry on the locus of control (LoC) among Hungarian students, using statutory cutoff dates for school enrollment as a plausibly exogenous variation. Our findings indicate a causal relationship between delayed school entry and an increase in internal LoC, with a policy effect of approximately one-tenth of a standard deviation for 8th-grade students, which corresponds to a one-third standard deviation effect for complier students. The policy implications of these findings are significant, providing evidence that delaying school start could serve as an effective intervention to enhance LoC among students, which is positively associated with many later life outcomes.

Using different variants of the classic climate game, we investigate the role of competition and the source of endowment (windfall vs. earned). Participants completed a detailed personality test (including climate attitudes and economic preferences) before the experiment and were asked about their strategies afterwards. We find that competition did not significantly affect whether groups reached the target, even though the probability of achieving the common goal was lower in the presence of competition. Participants cooperated more when they had to earn the endowment. Based on the pre-experiment questionnaire, participants who viewed their personal actions as more important and effective in combating climate change were more likely to cooperate in the climate game, while the rest of the measured personality items did not exhibit a consistent pattern. Analysis of the post-experiment survey indicates that those who aimed to maximise earnings contributed less to the common pool. In contrast, those who believed the goal was achievable and aimed to achieve it contributed more to the common pool throughout the game.

In this study, we examine how parents’ educational aspirations for their offspring (referred to as parental preferences) are related to university attendance. Even after controlling for the cognitive abilities of the child, we document a considerable variation in parental preferences, which are, in turn, strongly associated with university attendance. Utilizing regressions based on machine learning techniques, we also find that parental preferences exert a large and significant effect on university attendance, even when accounting for factors that influence parental preferences, including parental education, household characteristics, effort, expectations, and the child’s cognitive and non-cognitive abilities.

A main driver of the gender wage gap is that women earn a lower firm-specific wage premium than men. We document the role of flexible wage components in driving both within-firm and between-firm gender differences in firm premia. For this purpose, we link wage survey data on performance payments and overtime to an administrative linked employer-employee dataset from Hungary. We find that the gender gap in firm premia is negligible at firms that do not pay either performance payments or overtime, while it is more than 11 percent at firms where all employees receive performance- and overtime payments. These patterns are also present when we control for differences in the labor productivity of firms or after composition differences are accounted for using AKM models. Finally, a decomposition exercise shows that performance payments and overtime payments contribute 60 percent to the gender gap in firm premia and 25 percent to the overall gender gap.

Economic decisions depend on economic expectations. Using Hungarian monthly survey data between 2000 and 2009, we show that the relationship between expectations (both at the macroeconomic and household levels) and socioeconomic status (SES), as represented by income rank and education level, is non-linear. In many instances, there is no significant difference in expectations between the two lower quintiles. However, individuals in the upper (fourth and top) quintiles exhibit significantly more positive expectations than those in the lower quintiles. There is also a clear difference in expectations between the fourth and the top quintiles. In terms of education level, individuals with a high-school degree have significantly more positive expectations compared to their peers without one. Significant differences in economic expectations are also observed between high-school graduates and individuals with a university diploma, particularly regarding inflation, savings expectations, and the assessment of the household’s future financial situation. Disparities in household-level expectations based on SES are more pronounced than those in macroeconomic expectations. Past experiences and household-level optimism seem to be key factors influencing macroeconomic expectations. Furthermore, we document that both macroeconomic and household-level expectations predict the intention for significant expenditures, even after controlling for SES variables.

We study the role that firms play in social insurance benefit uptake after their workers experience health shocks. Social insurance in our setting, Hungary, is universal and comprehensive, thus allowing us to quantify the impact of firms on benefit uptake and labor market outcomes on top of the social safety net. Using matched employer-employee administrative data linked to individual-level health records, we find that firm responses to worker health shocks are heterogeneous: workers hit by a health shock at high-quality firms are less likely to take up disability insurance or exit the labor force than those at low-quality firms.

This paper explores how the network structure of local inter-industry labour flows relates to regional economic resilience across 72 local labour markets in Sweden. Drawing on recent advancements in network science, we stress-test these networks against the sequential elimination of their nodes, finding substantial heterogeneity in network robustness across regions. Regression analysis with LASSO selection in the context of the 2008 financial crisis indicates that labour flow network robustness is a prominent structural predictor of employment change during crisis. These findings elaborate on how variation in the self-organisation of regional economies as complex systems makes for more or less resilient regions.

Using individual-level administrative panel data of all diabetic patients in Hungary for years 2010-2017, we analyze the effects of primary care characteristics on healthcare provision in rural areas by exploiting the change of the person of the general practitioner (GP), be it a temporary substitution or a permanent new doctor. We estimate event study models and focus on three mechanisms: (1) discontinuity of care itself, (2) changes in physician’s practice style and (3) changes in local healthcare supply conditions. We find that discontinuity of primary care has a significant positive effect on treatment (as measured by the quarterly probability of outpatient care use, glycated hemoglobin testing and statin use), but only if the new doctor is a permanent one. Treatment style matters: while male or older GPs have close to zero impact on most of the healthcare variables listed above, the effect of the new GP being female and being younger is 2-4 %points; we also find some evidence of the interaction of the gender of the doctor and the patient affecting treatment. Finally, local healthcare supply conditions such as practice size do not influence significantly the variables in our case.

Chowdhury, Sutter and Zimmermann (2022) assessed the risk, time, and social preferences of family members in rural Bangladesh, presenting two main findings. First, there is a strong and positive association between family members’ preferences, even when controlling for personality traits and family background. Second, families can be grouped into two clusters: approximately 20% of the families are characterized by relatively impatient, risk-averse, and spiteful members, while the rest of the families have relatively patient, risk-tolerant, and prosocial members. Recognizing the pivotal role of cluster analysis in deriving the second result, we first successfully computationally reproduced the results, and then we conducted two types of robustness checks. The first examines the transformation of variables (continuous or categorical), affecting the proximity measure that is crucial to cluster analysis. The second assesses the effect of varying the number of clusters on the findings. Some results are robust, as we consistently find the small cluster of families identified by Chowdhury et al. (2022). However, divergent outcomes emerge with categorical variables (a logical choice given their nature) and a larger number of clusters (3 or 4). We conclude that, although the cluster analysis by Chowdhury et al. (2022) is valid, its outcomes significantly depend on the researcher’s assumptions and choices. Careful consideration of several alternatives is essential in exploratory cluster analysis to identify stable groups.

The linguistic-savings hypothesis posits that the grammatical marking of future events in languages is linked to future-oriented behavior. Recent experimental studies have suggested patience as a possible mechanism connecting language use and future-oriented behavior by exogenously manipulating what language is used. Our paper explores the association between patience and the language that people naturally use, thereby building on endogenous (as opposed to exogenously manipulated) language use. To capture natural language usage, we utilized a novel sentence-completion task designed for native speakers of the Hungarian language. This language allows for referencing future events through both present and future tenses. We hypothesized a positive correlation between being patient and using the present tense to refer to future events. We conducted incentivized and non-incentivized experiments with four independent samples of high school and university students, involving nearly 3,500 students in total. We find no consistent evidence that patience is correlated with endogenous future-time reference. Our null finding is further supported by a robustness check that leverages specific randomness in our data.

This paper investigates how the type of home environment – family foster care or residential care – affects the adult outcomes of individuals who were raised in state care during adolescence. While it is established in the literature that living in residential care is detrimental for babies, the effect of living in different types of care as an older child is underexplored. We use Hungarian individual-level administrative panel data and follow the children from age 13 until age 19. We show that the adult outcomes of adolescents who grew up in a foster family are substantially better even after controlling for a rich set of variables, including indicators of cognitive and non-cognitive skills, and mental problems observed at age 13. Young adults who grew up in family foster care are 8 percentage points more likely to complete secondary education, and 11 percentage points less likely to spend at least 6 months without either working or studying at age 19, than comparable peers raised in residential care. Using mental health medication is 5 percentage points less likely. For girls, the probability of teenage birth and abortion are smaller by 12 percentage points each. IV estimations using local foster mother capacity as an instrument reinforce the beneficial effect of family foster care.

In Hungary, initial pensions are indexed to average net wages, reported by official earnings statistics (ES), which does not cover the economy as whole. However, there is alternative statistical source on labour income, the national accounts (NA), intended to cover the total economy. The latter indicate a markedly lower rate of growth in wages than the ES for the period between 2010 and 2020 (4.9 vs. 1.9 percent increase in real gross wages per year). Relying on feasibility tests, we show that the rapid increase reported by the ES cannot, while the milder growth shown by the NA can be reconciled with relevant macroeconomic developments, e.g., changes in productivity and household consumption. We, therefore, claim that the ES overstated the actual increase in wages at the national level during the 2010s, and make our own calculations regarding the path of net wages and implied (hypothetical) initial pensions. The main implications of this exercise are the following: (i) the actual increase in initial benefits (linked to net wages, as reported by the ES) was excessive; (ii) in our estimate, the ratio of average benefits to average net wages did not fall by the extent shown by official statistics (the former is linked to the increase in prices, rather than that of wages). Moreover, (iii) the accumulation of major tensions between cohorts retiring in subsequent years might have been reduced by relying on the more plausible wage statistics reported by the NA, and by taking into account the impact of the dramatically reduced social contribution rate (paid by employers) in calculating initial benefits.