Publikacje | Publications

We address the gender wage gap in Europe, focusing on the impact of female representation in executive and non-executive boards. We use a novel dataset to identify gender board diversity across European firms, which covers a comprehensive sample of private firms in addition to publicly listed ones. Our study spans three waves of the Structure of Earnings Survey, covering 26 countries and multiple industries. Despite low prevalence of female representation and the complex nature of gender wage inequality, our findings reveal a robust causal link: increased gender diversity significantly decreases the adjusted gender wage gap. We also demonstrate that to meaningfully impact gender wage gaps, the presence of a single female representative in leadership is insufficient.

We propose a framework for studying the optimal design of rights relating to the control of an economic resource - which we broadly refer to as property rights. An agent makes an investment decision, affecting her valuation for the resource, and then participates in a trading mechanism chosen by a principal in a sequentially rational fashion, leading to a hold-up problem. A designer - who would like to incentivize efficient investment and whose preferences may differ from those of the principal - can endow the agent with a menu of rights that determine the agent's set of outside options in the interaction with the principal. We characterize the optimal rights as a function of the designer's and the principal's objectives, and the investment technology. We find that optimal rights typically differ from a classical property right giving the agent full control over the resource. In particular, we show that the optimal menu requires at most two types of rights, including an option-to-own, which grants
the agent control over the resource upon paying a pre-specified price.

A designer relies on a costly screening device to allocate a set of goods, aiming to maximize a social welfare function. We provide conditions for one screening device to dominate another. We show that the performance of a screening device depends on two channels: (i) targeting effectiveness which measures the alignment between the implemented and desired assignments, and (ii) rent provision which determines the utilities of agents receiving the goods net of the screening costs. We link these two channels to distinct properties of the joint distribution of agents’ characteristics, leading to a number of simple empirical tests for comparing screening devices.

Half of the jobs in the United States feature pay for performance. We derive incidence and optimum formulas for the rate of tax progressivity and the top income tax rate when such labor contracts arise from moral hazard frictions within firms. Our first main result is that the sensitivity of the worker’s compensation to performance is roughly invariant to tax progressivity. Second, the optimal tax schedule is strictly less progressive than in standard models that treat pretax earnings risk as exogenous. Quantitatively, the welfare cost of not accounting for performance pay when choosing tax progressivity is 0.3% of consumption.

We analyze the welfare effects of various policies aimed at global rebalancing --- the elimination of persistent current account surpluses and deficits, and/or elimination of large positive and negative net foreign asset positions. Specifically, we study how these policies will affect the welfare of different groups of households, as well as overall wealth inequality within both debtor and creditor countries. We use a two-country version of a workhorse heterogeneous agents framework of Aiyagari (1994), calibrated to the U.S. (largest debtor) and a composite of its trading partners, the Rest of the World (ROW). Our results show that, relative to full financial integration, policies that reduce global imbalances via an increase in U.S. savings rates will lower global interest rates, increase capital-output ratio and total output in both countries. They will improve welfare of the poorest households and reduce wealth inequality in both countries. Conversely, policies that operate via a decrease in ROW's savings will raise global interest rates, reduce the capital-output ratio and total output in both countries. The rise in interest rates will reduce the welfare of the poor households, even though the overall wealth inequality will decline.

This paper evaluates the worker-level effects of a historically large and permanent increase in the minimum wage in Lithuania. Our identification strategy leverages variation in workers’ exposure to the new minimum wage, and exploits the fact that there has been no increase in the minimum wage in previous years, to account for heterogeneous labor market prospects of low-wage workers relative to high-wage workers. Using detailed administrative records to track workers before and after the policy change, we show that the minimum wage hike significantly increased the earnings of low-wage workers. This direct effect was amplified by wage spillovers reaching the median of the pre-policy income distribution. Overall, we find no negative effects on the employment prospects of low-wage workers. However, we provide suggestive evidence that young workers, highly exposed municipalities, and tradable sectors may be more negatively affected. In contrast, labor market concentration or the presence of envelope wages appear to be associated with lower job losses. Taken together, our findings imply an employment elasticity with respect to the minimum wage of -0.021, and an own-wage elasticity of -0.033, suggesting that wage gains dominated employment losses.

We study the evolution of income and wealth inequality in an economy undergoing endogenous structural change with imperfect labor mobility. Our economy features two sectors: services and manufacturing. With faster TFP growth in manufacturing, labor reallocates from manufacturing to services. This reallocation is slower due to labor mobility frictions, which in turn, raises relative wages in services. As a result, income inequality is higher. Moreover, we study the impact of structural change on wealth inequality. Its economic intuition is more ambiguous. On the one hand, increased income dispersion implies increased dispersion in the ability to accumulate wealth across individuals. On the other hand, younger workers who hold the least assets are the most mobile across sectors. Their incomes are improved, which boosts their savings, which works towards equalizing wealth distribution. The consequence of these changes can by only verified with a computational model. To this end we construct and an overlapping generations model with two sectors: manufacturing and services. Our model also features heterogeneous individuals. With our model we are able to show how structural change affected the evolution of income and wealth inequality in Poland as of 1990.%Furthermore, we argue that the effects of structural change are stronger in economies undergoing a demographic transition.

Parenthood, especially in the first years after childbirth, is unevenly split between genders and varies by country. In countries like the three Baltic states, with relatively generous parental leave benefits compared to the EU and norms encouraging mothers to care for children, females’ earnings are more affected than their male counterparts. I carry out an event study to estimate the effect of having a child on the earnings of both genders and find that the earnings of females reduce by half in the first calendar year after childbirth and by 20% to 33% in the second, while male earnings do not change in either period. This results in a widening earnings gap in the Baltics, more so than in several comparison countries (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Norway), in the first two years after the birth of the first child.

Internet-based surveys provide data for social research for many years right now. Pandemic times sped up need for such sources, making seeking for effective ways to attract participants, especially in the panel studies, particularly important. In this study, we experiment on the existing panel study to test effectiveness of financial and non-financial incentives to participate in the subsequent wave of the Internet-based survey.

The experimental treatments were about to test several dimensions of such incentives. We compare whether when the reward is provided - before or after completing the survey - differentiate willingness to participate again. We test whether the fact that the reward is certain in comparison to a lottery with the same expected value makes a difference for participants. Then, we also test whether high stake in the lottery attract more current participants.

Not only financial incentives were tested. We also incentivized participants by providing them a motivational paragraph either highlighting what is going to be gained thanks to their participation, or what will be lost if they resign (in comparison to a neutral message).

I study a simple equity-efficiency problem:  A designer allocates a fixed amount of money to a population of agents differing in privately-observed marginal values for money. She can only screen agents by asking them to burn utility (through some socially wasteful activity). I show that giving a lump-sum payment is outperformed by a mechanism with utility burning when the agent with the lowest money-denominated cost of engaging in the wasteful activity has an expected value for money that exceeds the average value by more than a factor of two.

The US differs from other OECD countries in terms of family policy size and composition. This study examines the welfare and macroeconomic effects of family policy reforms. I explore three policy instruments: child-related tax credits, childcare subsidies, and child allowances. The children are merit good due to pay-as-you-go social security structure. I show that expanding family policy, like the American Rescue Plan, improves welfare. I also define the optimal family policy for the United States. It accounts for about 3% of GDP, three times larger than the existing policy, and primarily focused on childcare subsidies. Family policy structure is critical for welfare evaluation because similar expenditure levels can result in contrasting welfare outcomes depending on policy composition. This study emphasizes the importance of carefully designed family policies, as well as the need for ongoing research and policy innovation to maximize societal benefits and promote equitable economic growth.

We investigate immediate effects of a large scale child benefit program introduction on labor supply of the household members in Poland. Due to nonrandom eligibility and universal character of the program standard evaluation estimators are likely to be inconsistent. In order to address this issues we propose a novel approach which combines difference-in-difference (DID) propensity score based methods with covariate balancing propensity score (CBPS) by Imai and Ratkovic (2014). The DID part solves potential problems with non-parallel outcome dynamics in treated and non-treated subpopulations resulting from non-experimental character of the data, whereas CBPS is expected to reduce significantly bias from the systematic differences between treated and untreated subpopulations. We account also for potential heterogeneity among households by estimating a range of local average treatment effects which jointly provide a reliable view on the overall impact. We found that the program has a minor impact on the labor supply in periods following its introduction. There is an evidence for a small encouraging effect on hours worked by treated mothers of children at school age, both sole and married. Additionally, the program may influence the intra-household division of duties among parents of the youngest children as suggested by simultaneous slight decline in participating mothers' probability of working and a small increase in treated fathers' hours worked.

I study two types of unconventional monetary policy: quantitative easing (QE) and money-financed fiscal stimulus (MFFS), in a modified New Keynesian framework. I compare their effectiveness in stabilizing output and inflation when monetary policy is constrained by the effective lower bound. Money-financed fiscal stimulus performs better than quantitative easing, except the case of the TFP shock. It tends to cause lower inflation and output volatility. Nevertheless, it might be substantially more problematic in implementation as it demands cooperation between the central bank and the fiscal authority. Real reserve targeting (RRT) delivers similar outcomes as quantitative easing but is easier to implement.

This paper extends the notion of equivalent variation, Hicks (1939) to an abstract decision problem. It also provides a modern, ordinal variant of the maximum theorem, Berge (1963) that formulates the assumptions in terms of underlying preferences and demonstrates the continuity of the classic preference-based welfare indices (i.e., the equivalent and compensating variations) as well as the upper hemicontinuity of the choice correspondence. We then apply the theorem to the relevant economic problems.

An outbreak of a deadly disease pushes policymakers to depress economic activity due to externalities associated with individual behavior. Sometimes, these decisions are left to local authorities (e.g., states). This creates another externality, as the outbreak doesn't respect states' boundaries. A strategic Pigouvian subsidy that rewards states which depress their economies more than the average corrects that externality by creating a race-to-the-bottom type of response. In a symmetric equilibrium nobody receives a subsidy, but the allocation is efficient. If states are concerned about unequal burden of the lockdown costs, but cannot easily issue new debt to finance transfer payments, then lock-downs will be insufficient in some areas and excessive in others. When that's the case, federal stimulus checks can limit the extent of local outbreaks.

Less liquid markets for government bonds (LLMs) are characterized by many well recognized challenges which reduce the reliability of the classic Nelson-Siegel-Svensson (NSS) parsimonious approach. We document key stylized facts about government bond markets concerning liquidity, diversity of maturities available, bid-ask spread in price quotes, as well as price distortion in the very short end of the curve due to switch auctions. Based on these facts, we augment the NSS approach with model- and data-driven endogenous system of weights which permits reliable estimation of yield curves in LLMs. We apply our approach to the data for one of the largest European emerging markets: Poland. Through a battery of sensitivity analyses we show that there exists a class of weights that systematically gives better results than the classic NSS approach. The best fit weights have at least the same weight for the short end of the curve as a sum for all other tenors of bonds. It proves that inferring from the liquidity in particular maturities raises the information content and quality of yield curve estimation, which links our results to the expectation hypotheses. Unlike findings for most mature markets (e.g. US), for Poland there is a limited domain where pure expectations hypothesis (PEH) cannot be ruled out. Moreover, expectations hypothesis (EH) holds in Poland for almost all horizons. The existence of term premia structure explains the differences between compounded rates of returns from shorter investments and longer term zero-coupon yields of corresponding maturity.

The canonical infinite horizon framework with heterogeneous consumers, used in macro and financial literature, lacks a preference-based welfare index that produces consistent normative predictions for different policies. In particular, the classic preference-based indices, such as equivalent or compensating variations, do not aggregate and they are not additive on the set of policies. This paper offers a positive result. We show that for arbitrary heterogeneous von Neumann Morgenstern preferences with common discount factor, an equivalent (compensating) variation is nearly additive and admits a representative agent representation, as long as consumers are patient. Therefore, this index generates consistent quantitative comparisons of welfare effects in a wide variety of problems studied in the macro and finance literature. These problems include, among others, predictions regarding welfare impacts of fiscal or monetary policies, costs of real business cycles, or welfare costs of policies implemented in financial markets. 

We model the household disposable income distribution in Lithuania and explore the drivers of the increase in income inequality between 2007 and 2015. We quantify the contributions of four factors to changes in the disposable income distribution: (i) demographics; (ii) labor market structure; (iii) returns and prices; and (iv) tax–benefit system. Results show that the effects of the factors were substantial and reflected heterogeneous developments over two subperiods: changes in the tax and benefit system cushioned a rapid rise in market income inequality because of the global financial crisis during 2007–2011, but failed to do so during the subsequent years of economic expansion, when rising returns in the labor and capital markets significantly increased disposable income inequality. We also find that declining marriage rates contributed to the increase in income inequality in Lithuania.

We study the role of longevity and rising income inequality in growth of wealth inequality in the U.S. during the past several decades. A rich body of literature documents a rise in income inequality and attributes growing wealth inequality in the United States to rising income inequality, including capital incomes. However, during the post-war period, the U.S. has experienced a colossal rise in life expectancy, especially the rise in probability to survive to old ages, the longevity. Through the lens of any standard overlapping generational model model, this rise in longevity would translate to a rise in wealth inequality due to two mechanisms. A permanent mechanism involves higher wealth accumulation at the peak for each subsequent birth cohort. A transitory mechanism stems from a rising share of individuals close to the peak of wealth accumulation (the so-called baby boomers generation).

The ratio estimator of a firm's markup is the ratio of the output elasticity of a variable input to that input's cost share in revenue. This note raises issues that concern identification and estimation of markups using the ratio estimator. Concerning identification: (i) if the revenue elasticity is used in place of the output elasticity, then the estimand underlying the ratio estimator does not contain any information about the markup; (ii) if any part of the input bundle is either used to influence demand, or is neither fully fixed nor fully flexible, then the estimand underlying the ratio estimator is not equal to the markup. Concerning estimation: (i) even with data on output quantities, it is challenging to obtain consistent estimates of output elasticities when firms have market power; (ii) without data on output quantities, as is typically the case, it is not possible to obtain consistent estimates of output elasticities when firms have market power and markups are heterogeneous. These issues cast doubt over whether anything useful can be learned about heterogeneity or trends in markups, from recent attempts to apply the ratio estimator in settings without output quantity data.

Plenty of economic phenomena cannot be explained in the absence of family structure. For example, the immense changes in women's labor force participation are strongly affected by family structure: married women work less than single, and mothers work less than childless women (Greenwood et al. 2017). A significant share of these differences is a result of the family-specific design of tax and social security systems (Borella et al. 2019). Family structure is also a natural framework for studying intergenerational mobility and parent-child correlations. More and more macroeconomics papers reconcile the importance of a family and explicitly model decisions within the household. In this paper, we propose a systematic overview of this stream of literature.

We are not the first ones to review family economics in the context of macroeconomics, e.g. Browning et al. (2014). Doepke and Tertilt (2016) provide an excellent summary of advances in family economics and its successes in explaining classic macroeconomics phenomena. We extend their study by focusing on family-dependent policy interventions, the joint aspect of taxation, and the impact of labor market structure on fertility. What is more, an outstanding guideline of family economics models by Greenwood et al. (2017) pointed out several remaining research questions – concerning childcare subsidies, fertility policies, taxation, and within-family insurance. We prove that many of them have already received a satisfactory empirical and theoretical answer.

The definition of family differs substantially across macroeconomics literature. However, we can systematize these definitions using two dimensions: the household structure and decision process. We can distinguish two types of households: the first consists of the parent(s) and child(ren), the second consists of husband and wife. The latter fits analyzing gender inequality, unequal tax treatment, or family-dependent components of social security. The parent(s) and child(ren) family structure is the most common and helps explaining human capital accumulation, inequality, and fertility decisions. Both setups are employed to study different drivers of women's labor force participation.

In terms of the decision-making process, we can distinguish unitary households and households based on game-theoretic bargaining models. The members of the unitary household maximize the so-called household utility function, which describes the joint interests of all household members under aggregated budget constraint. However, the formation, as well as the dissolution of a partnership, usually require decisions of the individuals involved. Thus, it always contains the possibility of conflict. Bargaining models better reflect this feature and describe household behavior as the cooperation of utility-maximizing individuals. Despite that, the unitary household is a typical framework, even in recent literature. Models with bargaining are mostly used to describe the formation and stability of marriage and recently to analyze fertility decisions.

In the following part of the paper, we review both macroeconomics and family economics literature in the context of labor force participation, fertility choice, human capital accumulation, inequality and taxes, and social security. Depending on the policy in question, the literature proposes models with significantly different structures and features, e.g., types of heterogeneity, choice set, applied utility functions, and model timing. All of them contribute to the mechanism of the model and its fit to the data (Borella et al. 2018). We discuss below different model setups, with particular caution to policies' welfare effect. In this way, we provide a method guideline useful for future research.

This chapter is a part of volume "Pensions today - economic, managerial, and social issues" edited by Filip Chybalski and Edyta Marcinkiewicz.

We investigate the reliability of data from the Wage Indicator (WI), the largest online survey on earnings and working conditions. Comparing WI to nationally representative data sources for 17 countries reveals that participants of WI are not likely to have been representatively drawn from the respective populations. Previous literature has proposed to utilize weights based on inverse propensity scores, but this procedure was shown to leave reweighted WI samples different from the benchmark nationally representative data. We propose a novel procedure, building on covariate balancing propensity score, which achieves complete reweighting of the WI data, making it able to replicate the structure of nationally representative samples on observable characteristics. While rebalancing assures the match between WI and representative benchmark data sources, we show that the wage schedules remain different for a large group of countries. Using the example of a Mincerian wage regression, we find that in more than a third of the cases, our proposed novel reweighting assures that estimates obtained on WI data are not biased relative to nationally representative data. However, in the remaining 60% of the analyzed 95 datasets systematic differences in the estimated coefficients of the Mincerian wage regression between WI and nationally representative data persists even after reweighting. We provide some intuition about the reasons behind these biases. Notably, objective factors such as access to the Internet or richness appear to matter, but self-selection (on unobservable characteristics) among WI participants appears to constitute an important source of bias.

We provide weights and full documentation here.

We present empirical evidence that large structural shocks are followed by changes in labor market inequality. Specifically, we study short-run fluctuations in adjusted gender wage gaps (unequal pay for equal work) following episodes of structural shocks in the labor markets, using several decades of individual data for a wide selection of transition countries. We find that for cohorts who entered the labor market after the onset of transition. Labor market shocks lead to significant declines in the gender wage gap. This decrease is driven mostly by episodes experienced among cohorts who enter the labor market during the transition. By contrast, we fail to find any significant relation for cohorts already active in the labor market at the time of transition. We provide plausible explanations based on sociological and economic theories of inequality.

Undergoing a large structural shock, labor markets indeed do become less inclusive, but it has taken us several turns to identify a convincing knowledge gap and hypotheses appealing to the academic community. A much different and earlier version of this text was in the past developed within DISCef project. Our work has since changed substantially: the deeper understanding of theoretical foundations has led to improving the empirical approach and information content of interpretation. Originally, we combined a study into gender wage gaps, with a study into gender employment gaps. This approach had too much empirical clutter and too dispersed theoretical foundations. Eventually, the original work has evolved into two separate studies: the current, focused on structural shocks and wage inequality, and a companion paper looking at long-term drivers of gender inequality in access to employment.  

The files required to reproduce our findings are available below.

The Great Recession has strongly influenced employment patterns across skill and gender groups in EU countries. We analyze how these changes in workforce composition might distort comparisons of conventional measures of gender wage gaps via non-random selection of workers into EU labour markets. We document that male selection (traditionally disregarded) has become positive during the recession, particularly in Southern Europe. As for female selection (traditionally positive), our findings are twofold. Following an increase in the LFP of less-skilled women, due to an added-worker effect, these biases declined in some countries where new female entrants were able to find jobs, whereas they went up in other countries which suffered large female employment losses. Finally, we document that most of these changes in selection patterns were reversed during the subsequent recovery phase, confirming their cyclical nature.

This paper aims at disentangling factors behind the changes in income inequality and relative poverty in the Baltics. The evaluation of the income, policy and demographic effects was based on counterfactual scenarios constructed using tax-benefit microsimulation and re-weighting techniques. Decomposition showed that income and policy effects were dominant for changes in inequality and relative poverty. The policy effects were inequality- and poverty-reducing before the crisis and after the EU accession as a whole. The income effects for the same periods were inequality- and poverty-increasing. Despite rapid demographic changes, the demographic effect on income inequality and relative poverty was marginal.

We compare welfare and macroeconomic effects of monetary policy and macroprudential policy, in particular targeting loan-to-value (LTV) ratios. We develop a DSGE model with collateral constraints and two types of agents. In this setup, we study seven potential policy rules responding to credit growth and fluctuations in prices of collateral. We show that monetary policy responding to deviations of collateral prices from their steady state value results in the highest level of social welfare. It is also useful in stabilizing output and inflation. Macroprudential policy using LTV ratio as the instrument is dominated in terms of output and inflation stability by the interest rate rules. If interest rate rules are not available, the LTV ratio can be used to improve welfare, but gains are small.

We review the developments and practice of the discounted cash-flow method in finance with an intermediate goal of presenting parsimonious methods of generating density  valuation rather than point forecasts. Our ultimate aim is to select, propose and  discuss some density-based risk measures that may be used by appraisers and investment analysts when conducting DCF valuation for broad group of heterogeneous (by risk appetite) final users or investors. Such a toolbox may be applied directly by the latter group without necessity to rely on aggregated point valuations and recommendations.

Sample Matlab code to replicate the result of the two examples from this article is here.

Despite an apparent consensus in the literature that privatization leads universally to an increase in firm performance, the problem of endogeneity bias is profound and has been emphasized in a number of meta-analyses. We propose a new instrument to address the endogeneity bias and apply it Polish medium and large firms over 1995-2008. We find that improvement in firm performance is not universal, in particular, we find no improvement among manufacturing firms privatized to domestic investors. 

Methods for estimating the the scope of inequality in various outcome measures such as income, education, health or poverty are fairly accurate in detecting differences adjusted for individual characteristics. However, the actual estimated inequality may depend on the interaction between (the weakness of) the method and (the weakness of) the institutional environment. We make a case by comparing the country rankings for the adjusted gender wage gap among 23 EU countries. We show that the effects of these interactions are indeed large by comparing the estimates from various methods obtained from the same database. In fact, depending on the control variables and estimation method, a country may change its position in the ranking by as much as 10 positions -- both towards greater equality and towards greater inequality. We argue that this variability in country ranking position may yield important policy insights into prioritizing intervention. We also infer that given the intimate and unbreakable relationship between institutional deficiencies and features of the adjustment methods, ranking per se may be misguiding the public debate and thus should be abandoned or substantially refined.

Gender wage gaps are typically measured by the means of decomposition. Proliferation of methods makes the choice of the correct estimator for a given data a conceptual challenge, especially if data availability necessitates simplifications. The challenge lies in accounting for observable differences adequately, which in itself is not only a data issue, but also a conceptual issue. Ideally, one would want to compare men and women actually “alike” in terms of all relevant characteristics, including hours effectively worked, commitment, talent. However, many of these characteristics are not observable (or are imperfectly measured, e.g. human capital).

Decompositions are prone to multiple risks. For example, the urge to compare only the comparable implies that a decision needs to be made about the use of observations which clearly are not comparable. Nopo (2008) proposes to use these observations to infer about the possible selectivity in this process, but alternative approaches consist of reweighing or neglecting this issue. Similar choices concern the treatment of distributional issues. Finally, for the parametric methods, the dependence on the functional form may influence the results as well. Consequently, depending on the features of a given labor market, an estimate of gender wage gap obtained with a given method is likely to overstate or understate the extent of true unjustified inequality in wages.

We make available a dataset which provides a full selection of gender wage gap estimates for the EU countries, using data from EU-SILC. Across countries and years, everybody can see for themselves, what is the source of the gender wage inequality in a given European country. We provide:

• A dta file with the full set of estimates for the gender wage gaps and a generating dofile
• Data documentation

We consider feasible Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework specifications that are easily implementable in XVA engines when pricing linear and non-linear interest rate derivatives in a multi-curve environment. Our particular focus is on relatively less liquid markets (Polish PLN) and the calibration problems arising from that fact. We first develop the necessary tool-kit for multi- -curve construction and XVA integration and then show and discuss various specifications of the HJM model with regard to their practical usage. We demonstrate the importance of the Cheyette subclass and derive the dynamics of instantaneous forward rates in generic forms of different models. We performed calibrations of several one-factor models of that form and found that even with a relatively simple specification, i.e. Hull-White with two summands, we may achieve satisfactory results in terms of the quality of the calibration and calculation time.

The reform introduced in Poland in 2009 substantially and abruptly reduced the number of workers eligible for early retirement. This paper evaluates the causal effects of this reform on labor force participation and exit to retirement. We use rich rotating panel from the Polish Labor Force Survey and exploit the discontinuity imposed by this reform. We find a statistically significant, but economically small discontinuity at the timing of the reform. The placebo test shows no similar effects in earlier or later quarters, but in a vast majority of specifications the discontinuity is not larger for the treated individuals, i.e. those whose occupation lost eligibility. We interpret these results as follows: the changes in the eligibility criteria were not instrumental in fostering the participation rates among the affected cohort, i.e. the immediate contribution to increased labor force participation of these cohorts is not economically large.

This paper develops a simple business-cycle model in which financial shocks have large macroeconomic effects when private agents are gradually learning their economic environment. When agents update their beliefs about the unobserved process driving financial shocks to the leverage ratio, the responses of output and other aggregates under adaptive learning are significantly larger than under rational expectations. In our benchmark case calibrated using US data on leverage, debt-to-GDP and land value-to-GDP ratios for 1996Q1-2008Q4, learning amplifies leverage shocks by a factor of about three, relative to rational expectations. When fed with the actual leverage innovations, the learning model predicts the correct magnitude for the Great Recession, while its rational expectations counterpart predicts a counter-factual expansion. In addition, we show that procyclical leverage reinforces the impact of learning and, accordingly, that macro-prudential policies enforcing countercyclical leverage dampen the effects of leverage shocks. Finally, we illustrate how learning with a misspecified model that ignores real/financial linkages also contributes to magnify financial shocks.

In the context of the second demographic transition, many countries consider rising fertility through pro-family polices as a potentially viable solution to the fiscal pressure stemming from longevity. However, an increased number of births implies private and immediate costs, whereas the gains are not likely to surface until later and appear via internalizing the public benefits of younger and larger population. Hence, quantification of the net effects remains a challenge. We propose using an overlapping generations model with a rich family structure to quantify the effects of increased birth rates. We analyze the overall macroeconomic and welfare effects as well as the distribution of these effects across cohorts and study the sensitivity of the final effects to the assumed target value and path of increased fertility. We find that fiscal effects are positive but, even in the case of relatively large fertility increase, they are small. The sign and the size of both welfare and fiscal effects depend substantially on the patterns of increased fertility: if increased fertility occurs via lower childlessness, the fiscal effects are smaller and welfare effects are more likely to be negative than in the case of the intensive margin adjustments.

The emergence of global value chains leads to fragmentation of the production processes and reallocation of those processes across countries. With increasing number of production stages, the manufacturing process is located increasingly further away from the consumer. Literature suggests that fragmentation of production increases the international transmission of shocks. The global financial crisis is believed to lead to consolidation and shortening of global value chains and amplification of demand shocks along the global value chains, the so-called bullwhip effect. In this paper we study the effects of global financial crisis on employment, focusing specifically on the role of the distance from final demand (upstreamness) in this adjustment. We find that upstreamness matters for both labor demand and adjustment in employment during the periods of crisis, but this relationship is heterogeneous across countries. While the reaction to the crisis is indeed amplified further away from final demand, contrary to our expectations it is mostly channeled through lower job creation rates rather than faster job destruction. Moreover, the adverse effects of the crisis are lower in foreign firms, this difference does not depend on the distance from final demand.

 
Women in developed economies have experienced an unparalleled increase in employment rates, to the point that the gap with respect to men was cut in half. This positive trend has often been attributed to changes in the opportunity costs of working (e.g. access to caring facilities) and not-working (e.g. educational attainment). Meanwhile, the gender employment gaps were stagnant in transition economies. Admittedly, employment equality among genders was initially much higher in transition countries. We exploit this unique evidence from transition and advanced countries, to analyze the distributional nonlinearities in the relationship between the institutional environment and the (adjusted) gender employment gaps. We estimate comparable gender employment gaps on nearly 1600 micro databases from over 40 countries. We relate these estimates to changes in the opportunity costs of working and not-working. Changes in opportunity costs exhibited stronger correlation with gender employment equality where the gap was larger, i.e. advanced economies. We provide some evidence that these results are not explained away by transition-based theories, and argue that the observed patterns reflect a level effect. Currently, advanced and transition economies are at par in terms of gender employment equality. Hence, the existing instruments might not be sufficient to further reduce the gender employment gap.

The data for replication is distributed here.

We investigate willingness to share and download cultural content by implementing a novel "piracy game" modelled after standard public good games. Subjects' decisions have real consequence, as they are rewarded with individual "transfer" on a file-sharing service. We find that willingness to share depends positively on the sharing by others. Interestingly, however, this tendency does not seem to be associated with reciprocity or other-regarding social preferences. We employ several measures of sharing - from self-reporting to experimental - and incorporate to the analysis other factors which may explain the autonomous willingness to share, irrespective of the group effects. We find that conditional cooperation in content sharing is fairly prevalent, but unrelated to personality traits, attitude towards risk, attitude towards the other, marginal valuation, as well as socio-demographic characteristics.

We analyze the determinants of value added and productivity growth of New Member States in the period between 1995 and 2009. We show that in the analyzed countries exports contributed to roughly 30 to over 40% of the overall growth of GDP while the contribution of the domestic component varied from negative to over 60%. We show that in the most important export manufacturing industries of the NMS, the growth in exported value added was substantial, while the growth of the domestic component of GDP was mostly due to the growth in services. We associate growth of sectoral productivity with the foreign direct investment and exporting but, more importantly, with the position of a sector/country in the global value chains. We show that sectors that have imported intermediate goods have experienced higher productivity growth. Moreover, productivity growth was found in sectors further away from the final demand and in sectors exporting intermediate goods.

• This paper uses the WIOD data together with the accompanying Social and Economic Accounts.
• You can compute the GVC measures used in the paper (WWZ, 2013) using the Decompr R package.
• The codes computing the GDP growth decompositions presented in the paper can be downloaded below, if you use it or any part of it in your research, please, cite our paper. This code assumes that you have the WWZ (2013) decomposition ready.

Gender wage gap (adjusted for individual characteristics) as a phenomenon means that women are paid unjustifiably less than men, i.e. below their productivity. Meanwhile, efficiency wages as a phenomenon mean that a group of workers is paid in excess of productivity. However, productivity is typically unobservable, hence it is proxied by some observable characteristics. If efficiency wages are effective only in selected occupations and/or industries, and these happen to be dominated by men, measures of adjusted gender wage gaps will confound (possibly) below productivity compensating of women with above productivity efficiency wage prevalence. We propose to utilize endogenous switching models to estimate adjusted gender wage gaps. We find that without correction for the prevalence of efficiency wages, the estimates of the adjusted gender wage gaps tend to be substantially inflated.

The aim of this paper is to compare estimates of the adjusted wage gap from different methods and sets of conditioning variables. We apply available parametric and non‐parametric methods to LFS data from Poland for 2012. While the raw gap amounts to nearly 10 percent of the female wage; the adjusted wage gap estimates range between 15 percent and as much as 23 percent depending on the method and the choice of conditional variables. The differences across conditioning variables within the same method do not exceed 3pp, but including more variables almost universally results in larger estimates of the adjusted wage gaps. Methods that account for common support and selection into employment yielded higher estimates of the adjusted wage gap. While the actual point estimates of adjusted wage gap are slightly different, all of them are roughly twice as high as the raw gap, which corroborates the policy relevance of this methodological study.

What is necessary to make entrepreneurship sector successful? It seems like two key factors in this matter are quantity of financial capital and quality of human capital. So far, studies on innovative firms were rather focused on spending on resources, and not on qualification of people who are entering entrepreneurship sector. Using concept of so-called talent workers (Hsieh et al. 2013) we check who is entering self-employment in Poland. Our question is whether people who enter self-employment are more likely to create successful businesses. The analysis is based on the labor force survey panel data for Poland for over a decade between 2001 and 2013. We found that talent workers were more likely to become self-employed in this period. Results are robust on two possibly confounding effects – within sector mobility and productivity of workers before entering self-employment.

I screen academic literature for cases of misattribution of cited author’s gender. While such mistakes are overall not common, their frequency depends dramatically on the gender of the cited author. Female scholar are cited as if they were male more than ten times more often than the opposite happens, probably revealing that citers are influenced by the gender-science stereotype. The gender of the citing author and the field of study appear to have only limited effect.

Ethical norms on the Internet are believed to be more permissive than in the ‘real’ world and this belief often serves as an explanation for the prevalence of the so-called digital “piracy”. In this study we provide evidence from a vignette experiment that contradicts this claim. Analyzing the case of sports broadcast, we compare explicitly the ethical judgment of legal and illegal sharing in the offline and online context. We find that the norms concerning legality, availability of alternatives and deriving material benefits from sharing content do not differ substantially between the virtual and real worlds. We also test explicitly for the role of legal awareness and find that emphasizing what is prohibited (copyright infringement) is less effective than focusing on what is permitted (fair use) in reducing the disparity between legal and ethical norms.

Psychology and sociology literature suggests that the fact that women are less likely to work in STEM occupations may be caused by gender stereotypes related to differences in math and science abilities. In this study we test whether, particularly parents' beliefs are associated with their children's gender beliefs and with their choices of occupation. We show that the correlation between parents' and children's beliefs is strong. We use High School Longitudinal Study data - survey conducted among US 9th graders, their parents and teachers. Finally, we also test to what extend gender beliefs (parents' and own) correlate with planning to work in STEM fields by highschool pupils. We find that girls are discouraged (and boys encouraged) by parents believing that boys are better in math and science, and that the effect of parent's beliefs are stronger than the effect of pupils' school achievements in math and science.

An important feature of the reallocation process that took place in Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries was the decline in public sector employment due to the collapse of state-owned enterprises combined with an increase in private sector employment as new private firms emerged and old public companies were privatized. We propose a theoretical, parsimonious model which combines this feature with the standard search and matching model introduced by Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides. Using numerical simulation we show that faster transition (associated with faster restructuring of state-owned enterprises into more productive private firms) leads to a quicker convergence to the post-transitional equilibrium characterized by high GDP and high employment in the private sector. However, this comes at the cost of negative output growth and higher unemployment in the short run.

From a theoretical perspective, the link between the speed and scope of rapid labor reallocation and productivity growth or income inequality is ambiguous. Do reallocations with more flows tend to produce higher productivity growth? Does such a link appear at the expense of higher income inequality? We explore the rich evidence from earlier studies on worker flows in the period of massive and rapid labor reallocation, that is, the economic transition from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy in CEE. We have collected over 450 estimates of job flows from the literature and used these inputs to estimate the short-run and long-run relationship between labor market flows, labor productivity, and income inequality. We apply the tools typical for a meta-analysis to verify the empirical regularities between labor flows and productivity growth as well as income inequality. Our findings suggest only weak and short-term links with productivity, driven predominantly by business cycles. However, data reveal a strong pattern for income inequality in the short run—more churning during reallocation is associated with a level effect toward increased Gini indices.

This paper proposes a microfounded model featuring frictional labor markets that generates procyclical R&D expenditures as a result of optimizing behavior by heterogeneous monopolistically competitive firms. This allows to show that business cycle fluctuations affect the aggregate endogenous growth rate of the economy. Consequently, transitory shocks leave lasting level effects.

This mechanism is responsible for economically significant hysteresis effects that increase the welfare cost of business cycles by two orders of magnitude relative to the exogenous growth model. I show that this has serious policy implications and creates ample space for  policy intervention. I find that several static and countercyclical subsidy schemes are welfare improving. 

Wykorzystanie wspólnych tablic dalszego oczekiwanego trwania życia przy obliczaniu wysokości emerytury w systemie zdefiniowanej składki skutkuje subsydiowaniem przeciętnie dłużej żyjących kobiet przez krócej żyjących mężczyzn. Celem artykułu jest oszacowanie skali tej redystrybucji. Przeprowadzono symulacje oparte na modelu nakładających się pokoleń z obowiązkowym repartycyjnym systemem zdefiniowanej składki oraz heterogeniczności w ramach kohorty. Uwględniono również wydłużanie się dalszego oczekiwanego trwania życia, zgodnie z projekcjami demograficznymi. Zastosowanie wspólnych tablic życia skutkuje redystrybucją w kierunku kobiet na poziomie ok. 0,5-0,7%, wyrażoną za pomocą ekwiwalentu konsumpcji jako procent konsumpcji mężczyzn w cyklu życia. Taka skala redystrybucji w ramach systemu emerytalnego w bardzo niewielkim stopniu rekompensuje kobietom dyskryminację na rynku pracy. 

Since about 40 years the Laffer curve is used to investigate tax evasion in different ways and with different results. In this paper we present, using a critical literature review, the main considerations related to the Laffer curve starting from historically oldest theoretical models and empirical studies, through direct empirical estimations of the Laffer curve to, widely used nowadays, general equilibrium models, in particular endogenous growth models. We show, by discussing the advantages and drawbacks of these approaches, their different usefulness in studying tax evasion. We conclude that currently endogenous growth models, particularly DSGE models, provide an appropriate approach for the analysis of tax evasion using the Laffer curve.

The efficiency wage hypothesis suggests that wages are higher than labor productivity in labor markets where workers may shirk. The paper presents an attempt to verify empirically prevalence of efficiency wages in Poland. We utilize Labor Force Survey data for the years 1995-2010. Our identification strategy relies on differences in residuals from the Mincer wage regression between movers (i.e. people changing jobs) and stayers (i.e. persons who did not change employment in the observational window). The results provide tentative confirmation to the prevalence of efficiency wages in Poland.

In this paper we link the estimates of the gender wage gap with the gender sensitivity of the language spoken in a given country. We find that nations with more gender neutral languages tend to be characterized by lower estimates of GWG. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks.

In this paper we link the estimates of the gender wage gap with the gender sensitivity of the language spoken in a given country. We find that nations with more gender neutral languages tend to be characterized by lower estimates of GWG. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks.

Our source of estimates for the adjusted gender wage gap is an updated version of the dataset developed by Doris Wichselbaumer and Rudolf Winter-Ebmer for a paper published in Journal of Economic Surveys in 2005 and a paper published in Kyklos in 2008. The original data covers articles published until 2005, whereas we include studies published between 2005 and 2014. In total we added 1197 estimates of the adjusted GWG from 117 new studies for 56 countries.

To ensure continuity, we adopted the same conventions with respect to the language of publication (English) and the search engine (EconLit). We also used the same keywords: “(wage* or salar* or earning*) and (discrimination or differen*) and (sex or gender)”. To test if this search was not excessively narrow, we erased one keyword at a time from the first parenthesis, subsequently erasing the logical connectors (“or” “and”). We included published final or the most recent available versions of articles (chapters and books excluded). The complete list is available upon request.} Similarly to WWE, we excluded incomparable estimates of the adjusted GWG (e.g. non-parametric estimates along the wage distribution).

All the data needed to replicate our analysis is available below. The zip file contains:

• A csv file with the information on the articles added.
• Data on language gender intensity come from World Atlas of Language Structures
• Complete data set (combining meta-data and country characteristics)
• Do files

The New Member States have been experiencing firm internationalization not only through inward foreign direct investment but also through exporting, importation of foreign technology in investment goods and increased use of imported intermediates. We argue that there are important productivity spillovers within the global value chains, ie. FDI alone does not tell the whole story of the reallocation processes going on in the economies of the NMS. We augment the standard TFP spillover empirical model with modern measures of GVC participation. We show that increased foreign content of exports brings additional productivity gains on top of the ones attributed to exporting. Moreover, we show that in selected cases, participation in the GVC leads to a smaller productivity gap between foreign and domestic firms. In Poland the productivity gains for domestic firms are located in production of intermediate goods with high foreign value content as well as in goods located close to the final demand. In many other NMS the benefits are concentrated close to the final demand.

• This paper uses WIOD data and Amadeus database.
• You can compute the GVC measures used in the paper using the Decompr R package.
• The codes used to compute the Levinsohn-Petrin TFP from firm-level data, the FDI spillover measures from WIOD and Amadeus can be found here and some trade aggregates can be downloaded below. If you use it or any part of it in your research, please, cite our paper. 

Literature on charitable giving often finds that seed money matters: the example of a wealthy donor is followed by others (List and Lucking-Riley, 2002). Nearly all relevant theoretical accounts (e.g. that leaders possess superior information on quality of the project) seem to apply to the closely related environment of Pay-What-You-Want mechanisms as well. Yet, as far as we can tell, no empirical study has tested for that until now. To fill this gap, we analyze data from 16 campaigns of BookRage (an equivalent of Humble Bundle, offering bundles of e-books). We make use of the fact that a fixed number of currently highest contributions are always displayed (along with mean contribution and total amount raised). Thus a discontinuity may be expected: contributions that are displayed might directly affect subsequent donors’ behavior, in contrast to just slightly lower donations that are only observable as a (small) change in mean contribution. We find that the example of leaders makes no impact on willingness to purchase and amount paid. By contrast, the mean of past contributions has a positive impact on current contribution, yet a negative impact on the probability of contributing.

In many countries, the fiscal tension associated with the global financial crisis brings about the discussion about unprivatizing the social security system. This article employs an Overlapping Generations model to assess ex ante the effects of such changes to the pension reform in Poland from 1999 as implemented in 2011 and in 2013. We simulate the behaviour of the economy without the implemented/proposed changes and compare it to a status quo defined by the reform from 1999. We find that the changes implemented in 2011 and in 2013 are detrimental to welfare. The effects on capital and output are small and depend on the selected fiscal closure. Implied effective replacement rates are lower. These findings are robust to time inconsistency. The shortsightedness of the governments imposes welfare costs.

This article analyses the macroeconomic impact of the loss of autonomous monetary policy after the euro adoption in Poland. Using a two-country Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky prices and wages, we find that the euro adoption will have a noticeable impact on the magnitude of economic fluctuations. In particular, the volatility of output, interest rate, consumption and employment is expected to increase while the volatility of inflation should decrease. Also, in order to quantify the effect of the euro adoption, we compute the welfare effect of this monetary policy change. Our findings suggest that the welfare cost is not large.