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on Transition Economics |
| By: | Alina J?drzejczak; Kamila Trzci?ska |
| Abstract: | Gender equality is one of the fundamental values of the European Union (EU). Great efforts have been made to defend this right and to promote gender equality within the member states and across the world. However, substantial income differences between men and women are still observed. There is a debated research issue regarding the methodology of measuring gender gap – the traditional methods based on comparing means and medians seem unsatisfactory as they do not consider the shape of income distributions. In the paper we propose a parametric approach for estimating the relative distribution, which enables comparing and visualizing the “gap” between the gender groups at each distribution quantile. Such an approach moves beyond the typical focus on average or median earnings differences, toward a full comparison of the entire distribution of women’s earnings relative to men’s. The focus of the present paper is on income distributions across four Central European countries: Poland, Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary, the members of the Visegrád Group (V4). These countries share a similar history and similar economic development, but there are substantial differences between the national approaches to economic reforms, including labour market policy. This, in turn, is reflected in different income distributions and income inequality patterns. The basis for the calculations was the microdata coming from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). The statistical methods applied in the study turned out to be relevant to describe the gender gap over the entire income range. The results of the empirical analysis helped to reveal similarities and substantial differences between the countries. |
| JEL: | C4 J16 D63 |
| Date: | 2024–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lis:liswps:878 |
| By: | Jan Fidrmuc; Maksym Obrizan; Piotr Stanek |
| Abstract: | We analyze the wellbeing socio-economic characteristics of Ukrainian refugees in Poland and compare them with their co-nationals who remained in Ukraine. Specifically, we identify the determinants of happiness, trust and self-declared health, and the patterns of self-selection into becoming a refugee in Poland. We focus on how having experienced violence in the course of the current conflict affects socio-economic outcomes of refugees and stayers. We find that the refugees are less well-off both economically and in terms of their general wellbeing (happiness). Having experienced violence does not seem to compel Ukrainians to become refugees, suggesting that they move preemptively, due to the threat of violence, and not after having experienced it. Having suffered violence, however, has a lasting adverse impact on the happiness, trust and health of Ukrainians in Poland and Ukraine alike. |
| Keywords: | refugees, violence, happiness, trust, health, Ukraine |
| JEL: | F22 F51 I10 I30 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11393 |
| By: | Marcin Rzeszutek (Faculty of Psychology [Warsaw] - UW - University of Warsaw); Jørgen Vitting Andersen (UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique); Adam Szyszka; Szymon Talaga (The Robert B. Zajonc Institute for Social Studies - UW - University of Warsaw) |
| Abstract: | This study aimed to connect the behavioral corporate finance perspective (micro level) with complexity theory via agent-based modeling to analyze the impact of selected psychological factors of chief executive officers (CEOs) on stock market volatility (macro level). Specifically, we wanted to explore whether Polish CEOs' subjective well-being (SWB) influenced their managerial decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it might be related to the volatility of stock prices during this critical period in Poland. Our study was based on a survey of Polish CEOs who managed companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. In particular, 255 CEOs completed the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Positive and Negative Affect Scale, and a business survey on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on company management. Using the results of this survey, we built an agent-based model to investigate how CEOs' decision-making, stemming from their SWB levels, influences the perception of prices by individual traders and, in turn, how it is translated into aggregate stock market volatility. The results indicate the pathways through which the microscopic-level SWB of CEOs influences market price formation at a macroscopic level. The findings obtained from our model may shed new light on the rational expectations theory applied to stock market volatility during the financial crisis. |
| Keywords: | Subjective well-being, CEO, COVID-19, Stock market volatility, Rational expectations theory, Agent-based model |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04723512 |
| By: | Koen Caminada; Kees Goudswaard; Qingqi Liu; Chen Wang; Jinxian Wang |
| Abstract: | Relative poverty has, in general, become a popular source of interest for research and the public. However, only a few studies have focused on the determinants of relative poverty among the elderly in a comparative setting over time. To fill in this gap, this study decomposed relative poverty among the elderly in 21 European countries, namely Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Solvakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, based on micro data from the Luxembourg Income Study from around 1995 to around 2022. Various counterfactuals were constructed and simulated. The results showed that relative poverty among the elderly has decreased and is mainly associated with changes in the distribution of pubic pensions, followed by changes in the distribution of private pensions. Labor market factors, especially earnings, have become more povertydecreasing over time in most of the countries under study. Finally, the demographic structure played a positive role in driving relative poverty among the elderly. |
| Date: | 2024–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lis:liswps:882 |
| By: | Leo Azzollini; Richard Breen; Brian Nolan |
| Abstract: | Changes in household structures and employment patterns alter the balance between households with an above- versus a below-average poverty risk while also affecting relative income poverty thresholds. Examining eleven countries for which suitable microdata is available from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) back to the mid-1980s shows that patterns of change in household composition and employment exhibited some common features but also very substantial variation. The share of single adult households rose in most countries, couples with no or only one person in paid work fell in most, while couple households with two earners increased in a majority but not in Denmark, Norway and the USA and only modestly in Hungary and the UK. A counterfactual exercise assessed the impact of these changes in composition on relative income poverty rates by reweighting the 2019 samples to impose the composition structure observed in 1986. In the absence of these composition changes the relative poverty rate in 2019 would have been a good deal higher in Germany, Greece, and Italy, and especially in Israel and Spain. Composition changes had only a modest impact in the UK and made very little difference in Denmark, Hungary, and the USA, while working to increase the relative poverty rate in Czechia and Norway. This reflected the varying scale and nature of the composition changes seen across these countries. Their impact included driving up the relative poverty threshold (except in the USA), and if this effect is discounted the composition shift over the period would have had a greater poverty reduction impact in most countries, especially in Israel, Italy and most powerfully in Spain. |
| Date: | 2023–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lis:liswps:874 |
| By: | Kamila Trzci?ska; El?bieta Zalewska |
| Abstract: | Household income is one of the most important economic categories depending on various factors, in particular on the level of education of the head of the household. Salaries are treated as the market valuation of graduates made by employers. Hence, the question arises of how the education system affects the distribution of household income, in particular in the group of people with higher education. The aim of the article is to apply the Singh-Maddala model to describe the income distribution of people with primary, secondary and higher education in Poland and the USA. On the basis of numerical characteristics and measures of income inequality, the situation of education, in particular higher education, and its impact on household income in the analyzed countries were assessed. All analyzes were based on the Singh-Maddala model. The maximum likelihood method was used to estimate the model parameters. The analysis showed that the higher the level of education, the better the income situation of the household. In Poland, salaries in the group of people with higher education are the most unequal, while in the USA the greatest income inequalities occur in the group of people with primary education. The article describes the issue of household income distribution and income inequality, which is an important and current socio-economic problem. To describe and analyze the economic situation of household incomes of people with different levels of education in Poland and the USA statistical data from the Luxembourg Income Study Database (LIS) was used. Empirical studies conducted for different samples add significantly to existing knowledge on the topic. |
| JEL: | C10 C13 C15 |
| Date: | 2024–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lis:liswps:877 |
| By: | António Afonso; Ana Patricia Montes; José M. Domínguez |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we estimate the potential tax burden in a panel data set comprising OECD countries over the period 2000-2021. To this end, we use non-parametric and parametric techniques: Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). In this way, it will be possible for us to identify which countries are close to their potential tax capacity and which are far from it. Moreover, we can determine whether they may sustain an increase (decrease) in their actual tax burden depending on whether the tax effort ratio is lower or higher relatively to other similar countries in the sample. Non-parametric and parametric results coincide rather closely on the positioning of the countries vis-à-vis the production possibility frontier and on their relative distances to the frontier. Efficient countries most of the times are: Belgium, Colombia, Finland, France, Italy, Latvia, Slovak Republic, and Sweden. |
| Keywords: | OECD, tax burden, tax efficiency, Stochastic Frontier Analysis, Data Envelopment Analysis |
| JEL: | C14 C23 H20 H21 H30 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11333 |
| By: | Jad Moawad; Daniel Oesch |
| Abstract: | The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of employment and income growth. This narrative is both conceptually and empirically flawed. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980–2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that middle-class employment expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also experienced consistently larger income gains than the working class over the past four decades. The disposable real incomes of working-class households in France, Germany or the US grew by less than half a percent per year, compared to 1% or more for the middle class. Cohort analysis also shows that the promise of doing better than one’s parents held for the middle class, but vanished for the working class. |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lis:liswps:887 |
| By: | Ajayi, Victor (Energy Policy Research Centre, University of Cambridge); Andrew Burlinson, Andrew (University of Sheffield); Giulietti, Monica (Nottingham University Business School); Waterson, Michael (University of Warwick & CAGE research centre) |
| Abstract: | In April 2022, consumers in Great Britain (GB) witnessed a 54% increase in the energy price cap, as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, which sent wholesale gas prices spiralling across Europe. We leverage high-frequency data collected by the Smart Energy Research Lab, a representative panel containing daily gas and electricity data for around 13, 000 households in Great Britain between January 2021 and December 2023 to investigate the implications. We exploit several datasets linked to the panel data which include time-varying and cross-sectional information. We rely on two price shocks : 1) in October 2021 a wave of energy retail suppliers leaving the industry. At this time over two million consumers on fixed contracts were forced to join a new supplier and pay a variable tariff, and 2) these consumers were exposed to a second price shock caused by the Ukraine-Russia conflict which fed through April 2022’s energy price cap. Exploiting this pseudo-natural experiment, we use a difference-in-difference framework to estimate average treatment effects on this group of consumers and find that they would have consumed an additional 10 percentage points more electricity and 16 percentage points more gas had their prices remained fixed. These estimates are robust to a battery of robustness checks and point towards a significant loss in welfare for consumers on variable tariffs in the early stages of the energy price crisis |
| Keywords: | Difference-in-differences ; energy consumption ; energy crisis JEL Codes: L94 ; E31 ; D12 ; I19 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:warwec:1523 |
| By: | Janet Gornick; David Brady; Ive Marx; Zachary Parolin |
| Abstract: | Income supports in the U.S. rely heavily on targeting based on means testing, categorical eligibility, or both. One result is that some groups are relatively underserved, often because they fall between the cracks of existing categories. One such group in the U.S. is non-elderly, nondisabled, childless adults. We assess poverty rates and poverty reduction—the extent to which taxes and transfers reduce market-generated poverty—in the U.S. compared to six other high-income countries such as Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Each of these countries reduces poverty more than does the U.S. and/or achieves lower post-taxpost- transfer poverty rates. Based on our cross-national comparative assessment—drawing on both microdata and country-level indicators—we offer some lessons for the U.S. First, the U.S. workforce is notable for its large share of low-wage workers. The U.S. could lower the incidence of low-paid work, and thus reduce poverty among the employed, by increasing the minimum wage at the federal and/or state and local levels, and by expanding the share of the workforce covered by collective agreements. Second, both income taxes and social contributions are pushing childless adults into poverty—more so in the U.S. than elsewhere. The U.S. could mitigate poverty among childless adults via any of a number of tax-related reforms. Third, our results indicate that U.S. income transfers, for this group, stand out in how meager they are. The U.S. could ameliorate poverty in this often-overlooked group by providing more-extensive income transfers, to those both in and out of work. |
| Date: | 2024–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lis:liswps:883 |
| By: | M. V. Tamm; M. Oiva; K. D. Mukhina; M. Mets; M. Schich |
| Abstract: | Cultural data typically contains a variety of biases. In particular, geographical locations are unequally portrayed in media, creating a distorted representation of the world. Identifying and measuring such biases is crucial to understand both the data and the socio-cultural processes that have produced them. Here we suggest to measure geographical biases in a large historical news media corpus by studying the representation of cities. Leveraging ideas of quantitative urban science, we develop a mixed quantitative-qualitative procedure, which allows us to get robust quantitative estimates of the biases. These biases can be further qualitatively interpreted resulting in a hermeneutic feedback loop. We apply this procedure to a corpus of the Soviet newsreel series 'Novosti Dnya' (News of the Day) and show that city representation grows super-linearly with city size, and is further biased by city specialization and geographical location. This allows to systematically identify geographical regions which are explicitly or sneakily emphasized by Soviet propaganda and quantify their importance. |
| Date: | 2024–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2410.15938 |