This paper studies the effect of ambient air pollution on the number of births in the European Union. We collect air pollution data with web scraping technique and utilize variations in wind, temperature, number of heating, and cooling days as instrumental variables. There are 657 NUTS 3 regions included in the regressions, each with 2 to 6 years of observations between 2015 and 2020. Our results show that an increase in the levels of PM_2.5 – PM₁₀ pollution concentration by 1 μg/m³ (appr. 5-10%) would result in a 9% drop in the number of births next year. CO pollution levels also have a significant although smaller effect. If CO pollution concentration increases by 1 mg/m³ (appr. 15%) the number of births next year will fall by about 1%. In the heterogeneity analysis, we find that air pollution is more harmful to fertility in countries with already high pollution levels and lower GDP. This latter suggests that healthcare spending and the general level of living standard could be factors that moderate the negative consequences of ambient air pollution. To our knowledge, this is the first article to study the fertility effects of air pollution using an extended number of countries and years and at the same time including more than one air pollutant. As a result, our results have strong external validity. A remarkable novelty of our study compared to the previous literature is that after taking into account the effect of PM_2.5 – PM₁₀ and CO, the rest of the pollutants have much less role in shaping fertility outcomes compared to the findings of the previous literature. This difference is a result of the new method of this study, which examines the pollutants simultaneously instead of examining only one or a few at a time. This result can be important for environmental policies, where the limited resources should target pollution types that have the most detrimental effect on human fertility and health.

Magyarországon az elmúlt évtizedben az átlagos induló nyugdíjak lényegesen gyorsabban emelkedtek, mint az átlagnyugdíjak. Ehhez több tényező is hozzájárult, amelyek közül kitüntetett jelentősége van a valorizáció módszerérének és hivatalos keresetstatisztikának; írásunk erre a két tényezőre összpontosít. A tb-kezdőnyugdíjak meghatározásakor a legtöbb országban több évtizedes keresetpályát vesznek alapul, és az egyes évek nominális kereseteit az országos keresetemelkedés mértékével hozzák közös nevezőre: valorizálják. Magyarországon is ezt a módszert alkalmazzák. A tanulmányban ismertetett összehasonlításokból kitűnik, hogy 2013 és 2021 között a hivatalos nettó bérindex jelentősen túlbecsülhette az országos nettó átlagkeresetek emelkedését, ezáltal a kezdőnyugdíjak jobban nőhettek az indokoltnál. A tanulmány e kérdéskör több vonatkozását, köztük azt vizsgálja, hogy hihető-e az átlagnyugdíj/nettó bér arányának jelentős csökkenése, és kitér arra, hogy ilyen helyzetben milyen dilemmákkal szembesülnek a nyugdíjrendszerért felelős döntéshozók.

Tanulmányunk a magyarországi kisgyermekek és iskolások fogorvosi látogatásainak, a tejfogak és a maradó fogak állapotának, a fontosabb kezeléseknek, a közfinanszírozott ellátások elérhetőségének és a fogak állapotát befolyásoló egészségmagatartási jellemzőknek a társadalmi egyenlőtlenségeit vizsgál-ja. Ehhez felhasználunk minden olyan elérhető adminisztratív és kérdőíves adatforrást, melyeknek segítségével képet adhatunk a témáról. Rámutatunk arra, hogy már 2-3 éves korban jelentős társadalmi különbségek állnak fent mind a fogak állapota, mind a fogorvosi látogatások, mind pedig az egészségmagatartások tekintetében, és mindezek kiegészülnek a közfinanszírozott fogorvosi ellátások elérhetőségében mutatkozó szakadékszerű társadalmi különbségekkel. A kisgyermekkori különbségek az életkor előrehaladtával általában csak tovább nőnek. Tanulmányunkat a fogak állapotában fennálló társadalmi egyenlőtlenségek csökkentésére irányuló egészség- és társadalompolitikai javaslatokkal zárjuk.

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.