A közgazdaságtudományi közélet megújulásáért

Műhelytanulmányok

Árpád Stump, Szabó-Morvai Ágnes

MKE-WP-39027

This study examines the impact of ambient air pollution on birth rates in Europe. We estimate the causal effect of air pollution on fertility by utilizing variations in wind speed and the number of heating days as instrumental variables for air quality. Our analysis encompasses 657 NUTS-3 regions, with each region having 2 to 6 years of observations between 2015 and 2020. Thus, our study is the first to extend this analysis to multiple countries, pollutants, and years. Our findings indicate that a one standard deviation increase in particulate matter concentration levels leads to a 5.1% decrease in birth rates the following year and an additional 5.9% decrease two years later. Moreover, a similar increase in air pollution has a more pronounced adverse effect on fertility in countries with lower GDP. Other pollutants have little role in shaping fertility outcomes. This result is important for environmental policies with limited resources.

Horn Dániel Kiss Hubert János Szabó-Morvai Ágnes

MKE-WP-39024

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.

Szabó-Morvai Ágnes (r) Kiss Hubert János

MKE-WP-39016

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.

Bíró Anikó, Boza István, Gyetvai Attila, Prinz Dániel

MKE-WP-39011

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.

Boza István, Reizer Balázs

MKE-WP-39003

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.

Anikó Bíró, Cecília Hornok, Judit Krekó, Dániel Prinz, Ágota Scharle

MKE-WP-38973

Disability benefits are costly and tend to reduce labor supply. While spending can be contained by careful targeting, correcting past flaws in eligibility rules or assessment procedures may entail welfare costs. We study a major reform in Hungary that reassessed the health and working capacity of a large share of beneficiaries while leaving work incentives unchanged. Leveraging birthday and health cutoffs in the reassessment, we estimate employment responses to termination or reduction of benefits driven by income effects. We find that among those who exited disability insurance due to the reform, 60% were employed in the primary labor market, 3% participated in public works and 37% were out of work without benefits in the post-reform period. The consequences of exiting disability insurance sharply differed by pre-reform employment status. 80% of beneficiaries who had some employment in the pre-reform year worked in the primary labor market, compared to only 38% of those without pre-reform employment.

Anikó Bíró, Réka Branyiczki, Attila Lindner, Lili Márk, Dániel Prinz

MKE-WP-38970

We study the impact of a large payroll tax cut for older workers on employment and wages in Hungary. By exploiting administrative data and applying a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we document a modest employment increase equivalent to a labor demand elasticity of -0.3 and a pass-through rate of 22%. These average effects mask large heterogeneity across different firms. Employment mainly increases at low-productivity, low-paying firms, while no jobs are created at high-productivity, high-paying firms. At the same time, the tax cut is passed through to wages only at high-productivity, high-paying firms, while low-productivity, low-paying firms do not share the benefits of the tax cut with their workers. These results point to important heterogeneity in the incidence of payroll tax cuts across firms, highlighting that workers at different firms benefit differently from payroll taxes. They also demonstrate that payroll taxes can have a significant impact on the composition of jobs in the labor market.

Anikó Bíró (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary); Márta Bisztray (Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary); João Galindo da Fonseca (Université de Montréal, Canada); Tímea Laura Molnár (Central European University, Austria)

MKE-WP-38877

How do short absences from work affect workers' labor trajectory? We use linked employer-employee administrative data from Hungary, with rich administrative health records, and use unexpected and mild accidents with no permanent labor productivity losses as exogenous drivers of short absences. Our Difference-in-Differences results show that, relative to the counterfactual of no accident, even short (3-6-months long) periods of absence due to accidents decrease wages for up to two years by 1.5 percent, and workers end up with lower-paying firms. Missed opportunities to move to higher-paying firms account for 7-37 percent of the wage loss over a two-year period.

Tünde Lénárd, Dániel Horn, Hubert János Kiss

MKE-WP-38856

The gender gap in competitiveness is argued to explain gender differences in later life outcomes, including career choices and the gender wage gap. In experimental settings, a prevalent explanation attributes this gap to males being more (over)confident than females (we call this the compositional channel). While our lab-in-the-field study using data from students in 53 classrooms (N>1000) reproduces this finding, it also uncovers a second, potentially more impactful channel of confidence contributing to the gender gap in competitiveness (the preference channel). To disentangle the two channels, we propose a more precise measure of confidence based on whether the subjects’ believed performance rank exceeds, coincides with or falls short of their actual performance in a real-effort task. We label categories of this Guessed - Actual Performance (GAP) difference as overconfident,
realistic or underconfident, respectively. Surprisingly, there is no gender difference in competitiveness within the over- and underconfident subgroups, while a significant gender gap exists among the realistic. So, even if both genders had the same level of confidence, a persistent gender gap in preference (or taste) for competition would remain in the realistic group. This finding is robust across all specifications, challenging previous theories about the overconfidence of men being the sole driver
of the relationship between confidence and the gender gap in competition.

Anna Adamecz, John Jerrim, Jean-Baptiste Pingault, Nikki Shure

MKE-WP-38841

It is well established that boys perceive themselves to be better in mathematics than girls, even when their ability is the same. We examine the drivers of the gender gap in self-assessed mathematics ability using a longitudinal study of twins. Using measures of individual self-assessment in mathematics from childhood and adolescence, along with mathematics levels and test scores, cognitive skills, parent and teacher mathematics assessments, and characteristics of their families and siblings, we examine potential channels of the gender gap. Our results confirm that objective mathematics abilities only explain a small share of the gender gap in self-assessed mathematics abilities, and the gap is even larger within opposite-sex twin pairs. We find that the self-assessment of boys is positively correlated with the self-assessment of their male co-twins, not just in mathematics, but also in other abilities. However, this positive correlation is not observed between girls and their male co-twins; if anything, it is negative. This phenomenon might explain why men self-select into top jobs or STEM courses, that are filled with confident men, possibly making entry relatively easier for men. We also find that parents are more likely to overestimate boys’ and underestimate girls’ mathematics abilities. Gender-biased parental assessments explain a large part of the gender gap in mathematics self-assessment, highlighting the potential of the intergenerational transmission of gender stereotypes.

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