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.

We study the impact of a large payroll tax cut for older workers in Hungary. Motivated by the predictions of a standard equilibrium job search model, we examine the heterogeneous impact of the policy. Employment increases most at low-productivity firms offering low-wage jobs, which tend to hire from unemployment, while the effects are more muted for high-productivity firms offering high-wage jobs. At the same time, wages only increase at high-productivity firms. These results point to important heterogeneity in the incidence of payroll tax cuts across firms and highlight that payroll taxes have a significant impact on the composition of jobs in the labor market.

This paper evaluates a 90-day hiring subsidy designed for young jobseekers aged below 25, introduced in Hungary in 2015 as part of the Youth Guarantee programme. The subsidy covers the total wage cost with no obligation to retain the new hire when the subsidy expires. The analysis is based on linked administrative data taken from the unemployment register, cognitive skills measured at age 15, health and social security records. The causal impact of the subsidy on subsequent employment is identified in comparison to participants of a large-scale public works programme, using propensity score matching with exceptionally rich controls. The estimates indicate significant positive effects: participants spent 14-20 days more in employment within six months after the programme ended on the whole sample. The impact is weaker on the 12-month horizon. We find that the subsidy works well as a screening device: the programme has the highest impact on those workers who have very low levels of schooling (eight years of primary school or less), but demonstrated high skill levels on standardised competence tests. One potential explanation is that employers tend to retain those with better cognitive skills, irrespective of their formal qualifications. We also find some indication that the subsidy is (mis)used by some employers to hire short term, seasonal workers.

Jelen tanulmányban azt vizsgáltuk, hogy a 2014-2015 között legalább egy napig regisztrált munkanélküliek milyen tulajdonságok mentén vesznek részt a vállalkozóvá válást elősegítő programokban Magyarországon. Az adatok azt mutatják, hogy némileg hátrányosabb helyzetűek azok a munkanélküliek, akik támogatást vettek igénybe a vállalkozásuk beindításához – magasabb a pályakezdők, nők, alacsonyabb a felsőfokú végzettségűek aránya, kisebb az átlagos járadék átlaga. Eredményeink szerint nagyon erős az iskolai végzettség, valamint az értelmiségi foglalkozás, korábbi vezetői pozíció összefüggése a vállalkozóvá válás és a támogató programban való részvétel esélyeivel is. Tehát támogató programmal és támogató program nélküli is a felsőfokú végzettséggel rendelkezők, szaktudással bírók esélyei a legnagyobbak a vállalkozóvá válásra, ugyanakkor ők azok is, akik ehhez nagyobb eséllyel élnek támogatással. Egyértelműen látszik az is, hogy mivel az EU támogatások miatt a konvergencia régiókban több ilyen képzéssel, mentorálással és alaptőke-biztosítással kombinált komplex program futott, mindenütt nagyobb volt az esélye a támogatásba kerülésnek, mint Közép-Magyarországon, ám a program térbeli eloszlása meglehetősen egyenlőtlen.

This paper examines the effect of childcare availability on maternal employment in Hungary based on 2016 Microcensus data. We exploit the exogenous variation in access to childcare due to informal admission practices based on the date of birth, to identify the effect of childcare availability on maternal employment and the children’s enrolment. We find that on average, expanding the coverage of nurseries to the same level as kindergartens would lead to around 7.3 percentage points higher maternal employment, an around 25% higher employment rate compared to the baseline of mothers with a child aged 2-2.5 years. At the same time, the decomposition of the link between childcare availability and employment shows that enrolment would increase by 17.7 percentage points due to the higher coverage, close to 40% compared to the baseline. Enrolment in childcare would increase maternal employment probability by around 41 percentage points, around two-thirds of the employment rate of mothers. We also examine the heterogeneities of the effect along demographic characteristics using causal forests, and the economic cycle by expanding the analysis to the 2011 Census. We find that in 2016 the childcare availability effect is higher for mothers with 3 children, living in villages, or municipalities without nurseries. The employment effect is lower in the 2011 Census, while the effect on enrolment in formal childcare remains similar, suggesting the importance of weaker labour demand in 2011.

There is a large gender gap in the probability of being in a “top job” in mid-career. Top jobs bring higher earnings, and also have more job security and better career trajectories. Recent literature has raised the possibility that some of this gap may be attributable to women not “leaning in” while men are more overconfident in their abilities. We use longitudinal data from childhood into mid-career and construct a measure of overconfidence using multiple measures of objective cognitive ability and subjective estimated ability. Our measure confirms previous findings that men are more overconfident than women. We then use linear regression and decomposition techniques to account for the gender gap in top jobs including our measure of overconfidence. Our results show that men being more overconfident explains 5-11 percent of the gender gap in top job employment. This indicates that while overconfidence matters for gender inequality in the labor market and has implications for how firms recruit and promote workers, other individual, structural, and societal factors play a larger role.

This paper investigates direct peer influence in upper-secondary track choice in the stratified and selective Hungarian educational system and makes two contributions to the literature. First, it tests both peer-contrasting and peer-conforming influences by considering peers’ GPA and endogenous educational choices. Second, the paper investigates mechanisms behind peer-conforming educational choices (such as peers’ normative pressure and information potential), with a focus on two structurally different peer relationships: self-selected friends and randomly assigned deskmates. The study uses a unique dataset that merges administrative data with randomized field experiment data. The results show no evidence of peer influence, after accounting for unobserved classroom homogeneity. Within the classroom, peers’ ability did not decrease, and peers’ ambitious endogenous educational choices did not increase students’ own choice of the academic upper-secondary track. Concerning the mechanisms of peer-conforming educational choices, the results reveal that peers’ informational potential (but not their normative pressure) might be the mechanism that drives students to conform to peers’ choices. This paper interprets the absence of peer influence in upper-secondary track choices as evidence that peer influence cannot derail students’ socially determined educational choices.