Research
Working papers
Difficult Merits
Empirical and experimental evidence supports that people, on average, find performance-based income inequality fair and inequality due to pure luck unfair. In reality, performance can also depend on factors that are, like pure luck, not necessarily under one's control. I study in an experiment how transparent inequalities in two such factors -- difficulty of the task and ability in the task -- affect redistributive decisions. In the experiment, participants perform a simple task and then decide how to redistribute the income earned for their performance. I find that participants compensate those with more difficult tasks but do not compensate the ones with lower ability. On the other hand, participants deciding about their own payoffs treat inequality in both factors in a self-serving way. A structural estimation of the shares of heterogeneous fairness views reveals that around a quarter of participants consider unequal difficulties in their decisions, none of them unequal ability; the majority still leaves performance-based inequality unchanged, and the rest always equalizes the incomes.
Excuse-driven Present Bias with Marc Kaufmann.
We test whether people behave in a more present-biased way when they can excuse such behavior. We run two experiments, one on the Amazon Mechanical Turk and one with students in Luxembourg, to elicit subjects' willingness to work (WTW) today and at a future date. We elicit this WTW against an alternative that provides no excuses and one that provides an excuse. In the first experiment, while the no-excuse alternative always requires participants to work harder in the future, the excuse alternative adds a 10% chance of future work remaining easy. We find that the WTW today drops by $0.11 more than the WTW in two days when we move from the no-excuse to the excuse alternative, as if the excuse alternative is worth more when it allowed postponing hard work to the future. This result cannot be explained by risk and time preferences that do not depend on other alternatives present. In the second experiment, we test the excuse of a chance of not having to do extra work in the future, and another potential excuse: a different type of task in the future. The results do not support that a different task would act as an excuse for postponing work. For the chance of no extra work, we get non-significant results that nevertheless point in the same direction as the MTurk results. We discuss both experiments and describe a planned follow-up study with the goal of replicating our findings with excuses based on risk.
Work in progress
Print it Yourself with Attila Gáspár
We evaluate the impact of a door-to-door campaign on the outcome of the 2022 legislative election in Hungary. The campaign tried to facilitate voters' access to information by distributing weekly newsletters that compiled news stories from independent online outlets that were largely absent from the overwhelmingly pro-government legacy media. These newsletters were distributed by thousands of volunteers to smaller Hungarian towns and villages during the campaign. Though the circulation is not randomized, we are able to control for a host of settlement-level socio-economic characteristics, past election history and proxies of contemporaneous campaign efforts made by politicians, and exploit GPS data on activists' routes for identification. We find small but significant positive impacts on 1) turnout, 2) opposition vote share, 3) invalid vote shares in a government-backed anti-LGBTQ referendum, and 4) a larger, but mostly insignificant impact on perceived election integrity. In most cases we find no effect on ruling party support. These results constitute pioneering evidence in the effectiveness of door-to-door campaigning in a competitive autocracy, while contribute to the existing body of evidence on the impact of access to information in a captured media environment.
Publications
Compensatory Advantage and Inequality in Educational Aspirations. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, April 2024
Using two administrative and survey-based datasets from Hungary, I look at how children from different socioeconomic backgrounds update their educational aspirations in response to having to repeat a grade late in primary school. I find that grade retention is detrimental to aspirations and later secondary school track choice, and on average, it affects children of lower socioeconomic backgrounds more adversely. The average effect masks heterogeneities by the reasons for repeating: those children who are likely to repeat seventh grade due to poor mathematics performance do not change their aspirations after retention, regardless of their socioeconomic background. However, they are less likely to attend a secondary school track that provides access to tertiary education. As we move towards higher performers in mathematics – and consequently, more heterogeneous reasons for repeating –, retention results in a larger drop in aspirations and the probability of a secondary track ending with a high school diploma. In both outcomes, high socioeconomic status largely and, in some cases, entirely offsets the adverse effects.
The Labour Market Effects of the Polish Educational Reform of 1999 with Dániel Horn and Maciej Jakubowski, Journal for Labour Market Research, September 2022
We estimate the effect of the 1999 education reform in Poland on employment and earnings. The 1999 education reform in Poland replaced the previous 8 years of general and 3/4/5 years of tracked secondary education with 9 years of general and 3/3/4 years of tracked upper-secondary education. The reform also introduced new curricula, national examinations, teacher standards, and a transparent financing scheme. Our identification strategy relies on a difference-in-differences approach using a quasi-panel of pooled year-of-survey and age-of-respondent observations from the Polish sample of the EU-SILC database. The results indicate that the reform has increased employment probability (by around 3 percentage points) and earnings (by around 4%).