Research
PUBLICATIONS IN REFEREED JOURNALS
Absolute poverty measurement with minimum food needs: A new inverse method for advanced economies
Revise & Resubmit, Social Indicators Research
Energy poverty in the European Union. The art of kaleidoscopic measurement
Energy Policy, Vol. 190. (2024)
The Resilience of EU Member States to the Financial and Economic Crisis
(with Lucia Alessi, Peter Benczur, Francesca Campolongo, Jessica Cariboni, Anna Rita Manca and Andrea Pagano)
Social Indicators Research, Vol. 148, pp. 569-598. (2020)
Revisiting the Effect of Immigration on Native Employment in the EU
Research in Economics and Business, Vol. 4 (1), pp. 5 - 18. (2012)
Estimating the Hungarian New-Keynesian Phillips Curve
Acta Oeconomica, Vol. 58 (3), pp. 295 - 318. (2008)
DOCTORAL RESEARCH
(JOB MARKET PAPER!)
This paper studies the effects of population mixing on economic growth in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the most diverse country formation in modern European history. On a new hand-collected dataset of more than 1000 Hungarian townships, I find that ethnically and religiously diverse communities grew up to 20-60% faster in the 1880-1910 period than their homogeneous neighbors. These results are based on three different methodologies. First, OLS regressions take advantage of the largely random geographical patterns in diversity as a natural experiment. Second, remaining endogeneity concerns are addressed by a novel IV strategy based on townships' previous exposure to warfare, using self-compiled data of more than 2000 military events dating back to the 15-17th centuries. Third, to understand the mechanism through which diversity translated to higher economic growth in an era of rapid industrialization, I develop a simple growth model that highlights the potential trade-offs between comparative productivity advantages and reduced knowledge spillovers diverse communities are likely to face. Empirical tests of the model's predictions confirm that diversity led to more industrialization, more diversified local economies, and higher concentration of employment in productive industries.
This paper proposes a new explanation for the historical source of Protestant economic prosperity based on the reformed institution of marriage and the modern family. Specifically, I argue that Calvin's insistence on spousal duty to love one another, rationalize the household, and educate children for the glory of God was instrumental in the emergence of the child-centered nuclear family and subsequent economic growth. The empirical analysis of the paper is based on a unique hand-collected township-level dataset from historical Hungary which confirms the economic progressiveness of puritan Calvinists relative to their Catholic or Lutheran neighbors in 1910, and attributes it to observed differences in marriage patterns, household size and fertility rates, both before and during the demographic transition. A simple model predicts that lower exogenous fertility preference leads to higher per capita income when factors of production are fixed, consistent with the historical evidence of less crowded and fragmented use of agricultural land in Calvinist places.
Ideas on the Rails: Railway Roll-out and Institutional Development in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy
(with Miklós Koren, in progress)
This paper studies the effects of railway roll-out in historical Hungary on the spread of ideas and institutions during the 19th century. Specifically, we find that cultural commodities such as civil organizations, libraries, press outlets, coffee houses and theatres were highly concentrated in townships that had been connected to the railway network, to a much larger degree than what economic fundamentals would imply. By developing and testing a simple model of behavioral contagion, as well as exploiting the network of alternative communication channels (e.g. post, telegraph) to address potential endogeneity concerns, we are able to identify railroads as important capillaries of institutional development. Moreover, we also quantify the economic returns to these cultural commodities at the local level, and offer a hypothesis as to what role they might play in the context of endogenous growth models.
The Complexity of Anchoring Effects: Evidence from Art Auctions
(with Viktor Lőrincz, in progress)
Anchoring is one of the most powerful and well-established biases in laboratory experiments, yet very little work has been done to establish its presence in real economic situations. A paper by Beggs and Graddy (AER, 2009) is one of the few examples: using data from repeated auction sales of artworks, they find that an unexpected price shock at a given sale positively affects the price fetched in subsequent auctions. Using both the original and some novel auction data on contemporary artists, we find that the identifying assumption of a time-invariant unobservable quality component of artworks does not necessarily hold, and that the effects of anchoring may spread beyond the individual works of art and may concern an artist’s complete body of work or even entire art forms. These insights may then be used to identify anchoring effects in other areas of economics, notably in finance.