Agnes Szabo-Morvai

KRTK KTI; University of Debrecen

This study examines the impact of ambient air pollution on birth rates in Europe. We estimate the causal effect of air pollution on fertility by utilizing variations in wind speed and the number of heating days as instrumental variables for air quality. Our analysis encompasses 657 NUTS-3 regions, with each region having 2 to 6 years of observation...

We study the impact of delayed school entry on the locus of control (LoC) among Hungarian students, using statutory cutoff dates for school enrollment as a plausibly exogenous variation. Our findings indicate a causal relationship between delayed school entry and an increase in internal LoC, with a policy effect of approximately one-tenth of a stan...

In this study, we examine how parents' educational aspirations for their offspring (referred to as parental preferences) are related to university attendance. Even after controlling for the cognitive abilities of the child, we document a considerable variation in parental preferences, which are, in turn, strongly associated with university attendan...

The estimated effect of childcare availability on maternal labor supply varies highly in previous single-country estimates. We provide comparable quasi-experimental estimates of the childcare effect for seven countries, using harmonized data and a uniform method based on country-specific childcare eligibility cutoffs. We evaluate the estimates in l...

Our study examines whether there are differences between Roma and non-Roma students in three non-cognitive abilities related to emotional stability: locus of control, self-esteem, and depression. We have three main findings. First, based on raw indicators, Hungarian Roma students on average perform worse than their non-Roma peers in the examined no...

In our study, we focus on the concept of locus of control, a non-cognitive ability that is increasingly studied in economics. We review the economic literature on locus of control and demonstrate that individuals who believe they have control over their lives tend to achieve greater success in various life domains. Subsequently, we analyze data fro...

Previous empirical evidence is mixed regarding the impact of universal preschool on cognitive skills. We show that preschool enrollment can impact test scores positively if it does not lead to earlier school enrollment. We examine rich student data and use different enrollment cutoff dates in Hungary to separate the beneficial direct effect of earl...

This paper investigates the relative importance of confidence in public institutions to explain cross‐country differences in the severity of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic. We find that a 1 SD increase (e.g., the actual difference between the United States and Finland) in confidence is associated with 56.3% fewer predicted deaths...

We use an online game with randomized treatments to study gender differences in the impacts of competition and subjective feedback. 5191 participants were randomly selected into 8 groups: players either saw a Top 10 leaderboard or not (competition), and within these, they received no subjective feedback, supportive feedback, rewarding feedback, or...

Tanulmányunk azt vizsgálja, hogy a roma és nem roma diákok különböznek-e három, az érzelmi stabilitáshoz kötődő nem kognitív képességben: kontrollhelyben, önbecsülésben és depresszióban. Három fő eredményünk van. Egyrészt, a nyers mutatószámok alapján a vizsgált nem kognitív képességek terén a magyarországi roma diákok átlagosan rosszabbul állnak,...

Many countries have secured larger quantities of COVID-19 vaccines than their population is willing to take. The abundance and the large variety of vaccines created not only an unprecedented intensity of vaccine related public discourse, but also a historical moment to understand vaccine hesitancy better. Yet, the heterogeneity of hesitancy by vacc...

We test for gender differences in the impact of subjective feedback, using an online game with randomized treatment in the form of pop-up texts and graphics. We estimate the impact of giving encouragement or praise on performance (score, accuracy) and persistence (number of games played). We find some evidence of gender differences: while praise ha...

We use an online game with randomized treatments to study gender differences in the impacts of competition and subjective feedback. 5191 participants were randomly selected into 8 groups: players either saw a Top 10 leaderboard or not ( competition ), and within these, they received no subjective feedback, supportive feedback, rewarding feedback, o...

Many countries have secured larger quantities of COVID-19 vaccines than their populace is willing to take. This abundance and variety of vaccines created a historical moment to understand vaccine hesitancy better. Never before were more types of vaccines available for an illness and the intensity of vaccine-related public discourse is unprecedented...

This paper investigates the relative importance of confidence in public institutions to explain cross-country differences in the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. We extend the related literature by employing regression and machine learning methods to identify the most critical predictors of deaths attributed to the pandemic. We find that a one st...

We estimate the effect of mass media coverage of the meningococcal disease on the uptake of meningococcal vaccinations in Hungary. Our analysis is based on administrative county-level data on vaccination purchases linked to indicators of media coverage of the meningococcal disease and to administrative records of disease incidence. Using geographic...

We study the relationship between locus of control (LoC) and human capital investment decisions in the adolescence, using PDS lasso to exploit high-dimensional data. While LoC is not significantly associated with graduation from high school once we use exogenous controls, it correlates strongly with dropout age and college attendance even if we tak...

We estimate the effect of subsidized childcare availability on Hungarian mothers’ labor supply, using a discontinuity in kindergarten eligibility at age 3 of children. The effect is identified in a setting where policy intervention has a high potential impact, since maternal labor supply is very low under age 3 of children, but high for mothers wit...

Using instrumental variables approach this paper studies the effect of kindergarten starting age jointly with that of school starting age. We show that estimating the effect of kindergarten or school enrolment timing on later human capital outcomes separately, without taking their inter-relatedness into account, may confound the two effects and pro...