Centre for Economic and Regional Studies Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence

Economics with policy - International seminar series

03/09/2017

Bogdan J. Góralczyk /Director of the Centre for Europe, University of Warsaw/
Europe in China's New Strategy

China under current leadership of ever-stronger, charismatic leadership of President Xi Jinping has abrogated former formula and strategy of low profile, dictated by the visionary of reform, Deng Xiaoping, and known as "Constitution of 28 Chinese characters", usually identified with famous motto: taoguang yanghui (conceal your capabilities and avoid the limelight). Instead, under the current Fifth Generation of Leadership of the Chinese Communist Party we have much more assertive and active political course and imaginative strategy of the Middle Kingdom, as the People's Republic of China is more and more frequently returning to the rich tradition and civilization of China, starting from ancient times.

Helyszín: Budapest XI., Budaörsi út 45. VIII/807. (conference room)

The impact of international migration on the Hungarian labour market / The Hungarian Labour Market Yearbook 2016

03/13/2017

 

Joint workshop of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies /WIIW/ and CERS HAS.

WIIW and CERS-HAS decided to discuss some issues of the In Focus chapter of the Hungarian Labour Market Yearbook recently published by the Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The yearbook series presents the main trends of the Hungarian labour market using statistical information, conceptual research and empirical analysis in a structured and easily accessible format. Each year, the Editorial Board of the Yearbook chooses a special topic to be investigated from various perspectives. For 2016 the chosen topic was the impact of the in and out migration on the Hungarian labour market. While this issue is of outmost importance for Hungary it invites questions from an Austrian perspective as well. In the second part of the workshop the audience can get acquainted with the CERS-HAS Data bank. We plan to discuss also the possibilities  for cooperation between Hungarian and Austria-based researchers.

Programme

12:30 pm  Buffet lunch

1:30 pm  Welcome speech: Michael Landesman WIIW

Introductory remarks: Károly Fazekas CERS-HAS

Presentations:

1) "An LFS-based pilot study to measure outmigration from Hungary - what it tells us about migration from Hungary to Austria" (Zsuzsa Blaskó, EC, Joint Research Centre)

2) Employment-related emigration of Hungarians: changes and explanatory factors to the main destination countries since EU accession. In which sense is Austria a special case? (Ágnes Hárs, KOPINT-TÁRKI)

3) Out and return migration of Hungarian medical doctors before and after EU accession and before and after lifting the Austrian and German restrictions on the free movement of labour from EU-8 (Julia Varga, CERS-HAS)

4) On the intention of Hungarians to migrate to Austria (Endre Sik, TÁRKI)

Q/A session

3:30 pm  Pause

3:50  CERS-HASS DataBank: A call for cooperation (János Köllő, CERS-HAS)

The research center’s data bank collects the most important repeated cross-section surveys conducted in Hungary such as the Labor Force Survey from 1992 Q1; the Wage Survey, a large linked employer-employee (LEED) data from 1986; the Household Panel Survey from 1989; the Time Budget Survey from 1999; the municipality-level Tstar database from 1990 and several occasional surveys. The data are ready to use for academic research i.e. cleaned, harmonised and have been transformed into panels, wherever it was possible. In addition, the DataBank has built several big data sets using administrative sources. Availability varies depending on the primary data owners’ decisions.

Admin 1-2-3 are large LEED panels, which follow 50% of the Hungarian population in 2002-2009, 2003-2011 and 2003-2016, respectively. (Admin 3 is under construction). The data cover employment, earnings, transfers, state of health and financial variables of the employers. The Admin data sets are available for researchers inside and outside Hungary.

GEO is a large census tract (CT) based data set, which provides detailed information on the 45,500 CTs of Hungary and a matrix of availability with public transport and car, in terms of distance, time and direct costs, as of 2011. Linking GEO to the full Census of 2011 in the CSO-Academy data room opens a unique opportunity for spatial analysis.

The DataBank manages the CSO-Academy data room where full population and firm registers are available for analysis. The data sets can be linked with each other. Researchers are free to work with the data as they wish but the results are subject to output checking. The room is open for the participants (Hungarian or foreign) of projects led by researchers of the Academy.

A research laboratory with 40 end-points will be opened in July 2017 to support experiments in behavioral economics and related fields. The lab is open for outside researchers.

The presentation will yield a detailed account of the data, data availability and scope for cooperation with Austrian partners.

Helyszín: WIIW, Bécs

KTI Seminar

03/16/2017

Lecture:

Fritz Schiltz
Do parents respond to school inspection reports?
A quasi-experimental study

Abstract
School inspection reports provide transparency in the market for schools. It allows consumers (parents and pupils) to (re)consider school choice more objectively. We exploit the fact that chool inspectorates selects schools randomly – enforced by law – for a detailed assessment of chool quality. Unfavorable outcomes of the inspection induce reputation effects, which might trigger a lower demand for the school. This paper contributes to the growing literature on school information and parental choice. We find that parental demand for schools is strongly affected y shocks in transparency, following the publication of, especially positive, school inspection eports. Also, these responses vary with the school’s location and socio-economic composition. Flanders makes a unique educational setting for a quasi-experimental approach since no central examinations are performed. As a result, school inspection reports are the sole source of school quality information parents can rely on. The randomness in school selection by inspectorates combined with the absence of other accountability tools results in a truly exogenous shock in transparency allowing causal inference.

Helyszín: Budapest XI., Budaörsi út 45. VIII/807 conference room

Economics with policy - international seminar series organized by MTA KRTK

03/23/2017

Lecture

Jan Fałkowski /Faculty of Economic Sciences - University of Warsaw/
Do political and economic inequalities go together? Mayor's turnover, elite families and the distribution of public support to agricultural producers.

Abstract
This paper studies the effects that the distribution of political power may have for the allocation of economic resources and the distribution of benefits resulting from policy intervention. Using local level data from Poland, we investigate the relationship between changes in political power and the distribution of public support for agricultural producers provided in the form of direct payments which are based on the area of land owned. Our results indicate that higher levels of concentration of political power are associated with more unequal distribution of rents created by land ownership. More specifically, we find that in municipalities where mayor's turnover is less frequent, elite families amass disproportionally large amount of wealth.

Keywords: Political power; public support for agricultural producers; elite families

Helyszín: Budapest XI., Budaörsi út 45. VIII/807 (conference room)