Liquidity is a key consideration in financial markets, especially in times of financial crises.  For this reason, regulatory attention to and measures in this field have been on the rise for the past years. Based on practical experience, regulations aiming at ensuring funding liquidity or, in general, reducing certain risky positions have the side effect of reducing market liquidity. To understand this effect, we extend a standard general equilibrium model with transaction costs of trading, endogenous market liquidity, and the modeling of regulation. We prove that funding liquidity regulation or divesting bad ESG assets reduces market liquidity.

Public pensions are indexed to prices or wages or to their combinations; therefore, the impact of inflation on the real value of benefits can often be neglected, especially under indexation to prices. At high and accelerating/decelerating inflation like currently prevailing in Hungary, however, this is not the case. (i) With fast inflation of basic necessities, proportional indexation of benefits in progress devalues the lowest benefits, paying for above-the-average consumption share of these goods.  (ii) Annual, lumpy raises in these benefits imply too high  intra-year drop in the real value of benefits. (iii) With accelerating inflation, the declining real value of delayed initial benefits may incite immediate retirement. (iv) With unindexed parameter values (like progressivity bending points), the initial benefits’ structure unintentionally changes.

We estimate heterogeneous wage structure effects for country-pairs within the EU by the Causal Forest algorithm, then identify groups of workers with the highest and lowest discrepancies in terms of wage differentials. We find that, in the East-West comparison, age is the most consistently differentiating factor. People over 40 are most adversely treated in the East relative to the West, and especially those who have no tertiary education and work in small or medium-sized enterprises.

The gender earnings gap can be attributed either to the different distribution of males and females across jobs or to within job biases in favour of men. The latter is frequently called the wage structure effect, and it may be interpreted as wage discrimination against women. In this paper we focus on this second source of the gap. In particular, we study the heterogeneity of the wage structure effect by looking for the main drivers of it. On Hungarian matched employer-employee data we identify those firm-worker profiles that exhibit extremely high gender wage differentials We apply the Causal Forest methodology, borrowed from the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) literature, which has been utilized in several observational studies, recently. Our findings show that those firms that pay relatively high wages tend to discriminate against women most strongly, and especially with respect to women who have spent a longer time in the same firm. But this tendency is moderated by regional effects; where demand side competition is strong the wage structure effect tends to be smaller. These findings are, by and large, in accordance with the view that relative bargaining power is relevant for wage-setting, or, alternatively, firms practice third degree wage discrimination.

Social innovation (SI) has become a widely used buzzword in recent years. It is portrayed as a solution – almost a panacea – to many different types of societal and environmental problems. We can also perceive this development as a strong impetus to clarify its meaning, the actors involved in SI processes, their objectives, activities and interactions, as well as SI processes. Hence, this paper critically reconsiders the plethora of SI definitions, as well as recent SI models. As our main results, we propose a new, nominal definition and then develop a new model of SI, inspired by the multi-channel interactive learning model of business innovations. The new definition and model can offer a pertinent conceptual framework for SI policy-makers, policy analysts, as well as practitioners when devising, implementing or assessing SI.

Goal-oriented transformative change processes – that is, system-transforming processes that are guided by the ambition to resolve current or expected future societal challenges of various kinds – can only start once possible goals are considered by key stakeholders and the relevant actors are committed to act. Hence, there is a need for widening the scope of the current, partial conceptual models to consider the co-evolutionary interactions between technology, economy, and society to understand these changes. This claim is based on our review of Innovation Studies, Social Innovation research, and Sustainability Transitions research. The paper discusses the key conceptual elements of each strand; offers a definition of goal-oriented transformative change and building blocks for a new, integrative framework to analyse it; proposes directions for future research and draw tentative governance and policy implications.

As the world economy operates more and more through computerised transactions, new possibilities for intertwining criminal and lawful economic activities open up, as well as new opportunities for law enforcement agencies to fight crime. Considering the tremendous and potentially devastating damages caused by criminal economic activities, the issue should be high on the agenda of policy-makers, including R&I policy-makers. The race between criminal actors and the state trying to protect companies and citizens will be a permanent one. The paper provides and overview of trends and drivers in these domains, highlighting potential disruptions. It also presents four scenarios with a time horizon of 2040 to explore the role of R&I activities and regulations in shaping the possibilities for the interpenetration of criminal and lawful economic activities and derive policy implications.

The complex nature of criminal economic activities, their detection, investigation, and prosecution are related to research and innovation in at least three areas. First, research in, and the development and improvement of, information and communication technologies necessary to monitor, track and analyse criminal activities. Second, regulatory techniques for preventing innovators from i) moving outside the sphere of lawful activities; ii) moving too far and entering a grey zone where regulation is missing; and iii) settling on clear-cut criminal behaviour. Third, research in, and the development and improvement of, forensic techniques of reconstructing what actually happened, and thus attributing responsibility for crime.

This paper studies the effects of employment shocks on births and induced abortions. We are the first to show that abortions play a role in fertility responses to job displacement. Furthermore, we document precautionary fertility behavior: the anticipatory response of women to expected labor market shocks. Using individual-level administrative data from Hungary, we look at firm closures and mass layoffs as conditionally exogenous employment shocks in an event study design. After establishing that both shocks have a similarly large and persistent negative effect on employment and wages, we show that women already react to the anticipation of these shocks, and their fertility responses differ substantially for firm closures and mass layoffs. We find that abortions increase by 88% in the year before firm closures, while the number of births is not affected. Mass layoffs have no significant effect on abortions in the preceding year but increase the number of births by 44%. Mass layoffs and firm closures differ in one crucial aspect: pregnant women cannot be laid off until the firm exists, but no such dismissal protection is available in the case of firm closures.  Thus, when dismissal protection is available, anticipated employment shocks increase the number of live births, whereas when it is not, they increase the number of abortions. These results suggest that dismissal protection has the potential to support women to keep pregnancies at times of economic shocks.

Tanulmányunkban bemutatjuk a kontrollhely fogalmát, ezt a közgazdaságtanban egyre gyakrabban kutatott nem-kognitív képességet. Ezután áttekintjük a kontrollhely közgazdaságtani irodalmát, és bemutatjuk, hogy akik úgy gondolják, maguk irányítják az életüket, sikeresebbek az élet számos területén. Ezt követően egy reprezentatív magyar felmérés adatait vizsgáljuk meg, amelyen többnyire viszontlátjuk a szakirodalom által feltárt összefüggéseket. A kontrollhely a válaszadók 20-30-as éveiben egyre belsőbbé válik, majd 40 éves kor után ismét egyre külsőbb lesz. A mintánkban a férfiak inkább belső kontrollosak, mint a nők, valamint a belsőbb kontrollhely magasabb végzettséggel és magasabb jövedelemmel jár együtt. Ugyanakkor nem találunk szignifikáns összefüggést a kontrollhely és a munkaerőpiaci státusz között. Azt találjuk, hogy a belső kontrollosok szignifikánsan több megtakarítást és kevesebb tartozást halmoznak fel.

We consider financial networks where agents are linked to each other via mutual liabilities. In case of bankruptcy, there are potentially many bankruptcy rules, ways to distribute the assets of a bankrupt agent over the other agents. One common approach is to first apply pairwise netting of agents that have mutual liabilities and next use the proportional rule to determine the payments on the basis of the net liabilities. We refer to this as the pairwise netting proportional rule. The pairwise netting proportional rule satisfies the basic requirements of claims boundedness, limited liability, priority of creditors, and continuity. It also satisfies the desirable properties of net impartiality, an agent that has two creditors with the same net claims pays the same amount to both creditors on top of pairwise netting, and invariance to mitosis, an agent that splits into a number of identical agents is not affecting the payments of the other agents. We demonstrate that if net impartiality and invariance to mitosis, together with the basic requirements, are regarded as imperative properties, then payments should be determined by the pairwise netting proportional rule.

Social theories posit that peers affect students’ academic self-concept (ASC). Most prominently, Big-Fish-Little-Pond, invidious comparison, and relative deprivation theories predict that exposure to academically stronger peers decreases students’ ASC, and exposure to academically weaker peers increases students’ ASC. These propositions have not yet been tested experimentally. We executed a large and pre-registered field experiment that randomized students to deskmates within 195 classrooms of 41 schools (N = 3,022). Our primary experimental analysis found no evidence of an effect of peer achievement on ASC in either direction. Exploratory analyses hinted at a subject-specific deskmate effect on ASC in verbal skills, and that sitting next to a lower-achieving boy increased girls’ ASC (but not that sitting next to a higher-achieving boy decreased girls’ ASC). Critically, however, none of these group-specific results held up to even modest corrections for multiple hypothesis testing. Contrary to theory, our randomized field experiment thus provides no evidence for an effect of peer achievement on students’ ASC.

Online cash registers (OCRs) are important tools for reducing the size of the shadow economy. This paper analyzes the impact on reported turnover and tax liability of introducing OCRs in Hungary using a fixed-effects panel and event study model. We identify strong size-related heterogeneity in the retail and the accommodation and food services sectors: smaller companies increased their reported turnover more than larger ones. Since large companies pay the dominant part of value-added tax, the effects on the payment of this tax were mitigated. We find significant spillover effects in both sectors, which are slightly stronger among larger companies.