Dániel Horn

• senior research fellow
• Director at HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies

The Hungarian system is ideal to test the effect of early-selection on inequality of opportunity, since students are selected at three different ages. The early-selective academic tracks skim off the best students first at age 10, then at age 12, and finally at age 14 all students enter secondary level. The paper first shows that higher socioeconom...

The Polish educational reform in 1999 is often considered successful as the results of the Polish students, and especially that of the low-performers, on the OECD PISA tests have improved significantly since the introduction of the new system. The reform extended the previous 8-year undivided comprehensive education to 9 years, core curricula were...

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...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change 1–5 . Individuals involved in collective action problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards a public solution or free-ride. But they might also choose a third option of investing in a private so...

Chowdhury, Sutter and Zimmermann (2022) assessed the risk, time, and social preferences of family members in rural Bangladesh, presenting two main findings. First, there is a strong and positive association between family members’ preferences, even when controlling for personality traits and family background. Second, families can be grouped into t...

A tanulmány célja azon tanulói önszabályozáshoz kapcsolódó tényező azonosítása, amelyek együtt járnak a felsőoktatási sikerességgel. Magyarország egyik vezető tudományegyetemén felvett, önkéntes kitöltéseken alapuló keresztmetszeti mintán vetjük össze a hallgatók lelkiismeretességét, időgazdálkodását, halogatását, türelmét és jelen-torzítását jelle...

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...

The paper studies a unique education reform that decreased the length of secondary-level vocational education from 4 to 3 years, reducing the time spent on general subjects while keeping the time spent on vocational training. We use a difference-in-difference strategy by comparing reformed schools with early adopters before and after the reform. We...

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 examina...

There is growing evidence that schooling and income associate positively with democracy and patience, suggesting a potential link between democracy and patience. We test if indeed the political regime of countries associates with the average patience of their citizens. We document a highly significant positive raw association between the level of d...

In recent years public and political debate suggested that individuals with children value the future more. We attempt to substantiate the debate, and we use a representative survey to investigate if the number of children (or simply having children) is indeed associated with a higher valuation of the future, which we proxy with an aspect of time p...

Between March 2019 and March 2020, we visited 53 school groups (classes) in 9 Hungarian schools to measure time, risk, social and competitive preferences of 1108 secondary school students using incentivized laboratory experimental tasks. We applied the unfolding brackets method to measure time preferences [1], and the bomb-risk elicitation task [2]...

In this study, we ask if high-stakes testing affects school-related stress among students and if there are gender differences in these effects. Students’ results on high-stakes tests can have long-term consequences for their future educational trajectories and life chances. For girls, who tend to have higher educational aspirations and tend to gain...

Tanulmányunkban nagymintás adminisztratív paneladatokon mutatjuk meg, hogy az országos kompetenciamérés 10. évfolyamos tesztpontszámai erősen összefüggnek a korai munkaerőpiaci helyzettel. Eredményeink szerint egy szórással jobb matematikai tesztpontszám átlagosan körülbelül 4-5 százalékkal, míg egy szórással nagyobb szövegértési tesztpontszám ezen...

In this study, we estimate unadjusted and adjusted gender gaps in time preference, risk attitudes, altruism, trust, trustworthiness, cooperation, and competitiveness using data on 1088 high school students from 53 classes. These data, collected by running incentivized experiments in Hungarian classrooms, are linked to an administrative data source...

Since trust correlates with economic development and in turn economic development associates with political regime, we conjecture that there may be a relationship between trust and political regime. Without looking for any casual inference, we investigate if trust aggregated on the country level correlates with the country's political regime. Speci...

Ebben a tanulmányban két reprezentatív felmérés segítségével azt vizsgáltuk meg, hogy egyéni szinten hogyan viszonyul egymáshoz a versengés és az együttműködés, illetve ezek hogyan függenek össze a végzettséggel. Egyrészt az találtuk, hogy a versengés és az együttműködés pozitívan és szignifikánsan korrelál, még akkor is, ha figyelembe vesszük a vá...

In this study, we estimate unadjusted and adjusted gender gap in time preference, risk attitudes, altruism, trust, trustworthiness, cooperation and competitiveness using data on 1088 high-school students from 53 classes. These data, collected by running incentivized experiments in Hungarian classrooms, are linked to an administrative data source on...

We collect data on time preferences of a representative sample of the Hungarian adult population in a non-incentivized way and investigate how patience and present bias associate with important life outcomes in five domains: i) educational attainment, ii) unemployment, iii) income and wealth, iv) financial decisions and difficulties, and v) health....

In this paper, we document how we carried out a research that aimed at measuring the economic preferences of high school students. We describe the preferences that we study and what experimental games we used to investigate them. Then we report how we carried out the experiments in the schools. We provide detailed descriptive statistics on the pref...

Since trust correlates with economic development and in turn economic development associates with political regime, we conjecture that there may be a relationship between trust and political regime. We investigate if trust aggregated on the country level correlates with the political regime. We do not find any significant association, with or witho...

We test if the political regime of a country associates with the patience of the citizens. Recent findings indicate that i) more democratic countries tend have higher growth, and ii) patience correlates positively with economic development, suggesting a potential link between the political regime and patience. We document a positive association bet...

In recent years public and political debate suggested that individuals with children value the future more. We attempt to substantiate the debate and using a representative survey we investigate if the number of children (or simply having children) indeed is associated with a higher valuation of the future that we proxy with an aspect of time prefe...

We detect a significant negative effect of mentioning ‘gender’ as a research topic on conducting academic research in Hungary. Using a randomized information treatment involving a comprehensive sample of Hungarian education providers we find that they are less willing to cooperate in a gender-related future research compared to a research without t...

A tanulmány egy reprezentatív mintára alapozva azt vizsgálja, hogy a regionális és településtípussal kapcsolatos változók mellett a demográfiai (nem, kor), társadalmi (végzettség, jövedelem) és munkaerőpiaci jellemzők (munkanélküliség, közszféra), illetve az egyéni preferenciák (kockázatvállalás és türelem) milyen összefüggésben állnak azzal, hogy...

Elite schools in Hungary cherry pick high achieving students from general primary schools. The geographical coverage of elite schools has remained unchanged since 1999, when the establishment of new elite schools stopped. We exploit this geographical variation and estimate the impact of high achieving peers leaving the class on student achievement,...

Elite schools in Hungary cherry pick high achieving students from general primary schools. The geographical coverage of elite schools has remained unchanged since 1999, when the establishment of new elite schools stopped.We exploit this geographical variation in the immobile Hungarian society and estimate the impact of high achieving peers leaving...

We collect data on time preferences of a representative sample of the Hungarian population in a non-incentivized way and investigate how patience and present bias associate with important life outcomes in five domains: i) educational attainment, ii) unemployment, iii) income and wealth, iv) financial decisions and difficulties, and v) health. Based...

Multiplicative interaction terms are widely used in economics to identify heterogeneous effects and to tailor policy recommendations. The execution of these models is often flawed due to specification and interpretation errors. This paper introduces regression trees and regression tree ensembles to model and visualise interaction effects. Tree-base...

Success in life is determined to a large extent by school performance so it is important to understand the effect of the factors that influence it. In this exploratory study, in addition to cognitive abilities, we attempt to link measures of preferences with outcomes of school performance. We measured in an incentivized way risk, time, social and c...

The file S1 Appendix.docx contains the instructions that we used in the experiment. The original instructions were in Hungarian, this supplementary material contains the English translation. (DOCX)

The file S2 Appendix.docx contains a detailed description of how Dean and Ortoleva [76] carried out a similar experiment measuring many of the preferences that we also measure. (DOCX)

The file Supporting Information_Do file.do contains the do file that can be used to replicate our results. (DO)

We attempt to link laboratory-based measures of preferences with measures of school performance. We measured in an incentivized way risk, time, social and competitive preferences and also cognitive abilities of university students and look for associations between these measures and two important academic outcome measures: exam results and GPA. We...

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...

We attempt to link laboratory-based measures of preferences with measures of school performance. We measured in an incentivized way risk, time, social and competitive preferences and also cognitive abilities of university students and look for associations between these measures and two important academic outcome measures: exam results and GPA. We...

One of the earliest studies based on Robert Mare’s (1981) concept of and statistical approach to educational choices and transitions was an analysis based on 1973 data from the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (Simkus and Andorka 1982). Since then, a great variety of sociological and economic studies have investigated educational inequalities,...

Magyarországon az 1990-es években a kisgimnáziumok megnyitásával fokozatosan növekedett az iskolarendszer szelektivitása. Ennek az átmenetnek a sajátosságait kihasználva vizsgáljuk a korai iskolai szelekció és az iskolai, illetve munkaerő-piaci kimenetek közötti oksági kapcsolatot. Az iskolák megalapításának területi és idővarianciájára építve, kül...

Using the 2008 cross-sectional wave of the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey and multilevel modeling techniques, this article explores the macro-level determinants of the gender-poverty gap in the ten post-socialist EU member states. In dialogue with the literature on the impact of economic development on gender inequality...

The ‘dual system’ combining school-based vocational education with employer-provided training is often praised for effectively integrating young people into the labour market and recommended as a model for countries struggling with high youth unemployment. However, without an institutional framework supporting employer involvement, it has proven di...

Previous research provided ambiguous results on the association between average student performance and inequality of opportunity measured by the effect of family background on student achievement. In this paper we explore this association distinguishing between inequality of opportunity at the bottom and the top of the score distribution using a t...

Social research has long pointed to the apparent effectiveness of vocational education and training (VET) at the secondary level combining school-based vocational education with employer-provided training (so called "dual systems") in preparing non-college bound youth for the labor market. This study uses the Hungarian transformation process to bet...

This paper adopts the stratification-standardization framework proposed by Allmendinger (1989) to analyze the effects of educational institutions and the organization of education on the inequality of opportunity and effectiveness of national education systems. The analyses are conducted on OECD countries participating in the Programme for Internat...

This research note examines the relationship between systems of education across the EU and the issue of equality of opportunity, based largely on a review of the existing literature. The broad definition of equity used by some studies (e.g. OECD equity reports) is too general for the purpose of this brief. The three common dimensions of equality -...

Prior research on the consequences of the transition from socialism to capitalism has largely ignored the consequences of the transformation for the education system. Yet, closer inspection reveals substantial dynamism in the education systems of Central- and Eastern European countries after 1989. In this study, we focus on the consequences of syst...

The paper looks at the link between inequality and voter turnout, and derives three hypothesis from previous literature. It is shown that inequality associates negatively with turnout at the national elections (hypothesis 1). Although this is not a very strong effect, but it is net of several factors affecting voter turnout that are empirically wel...

"In this paper I combine a theoretically developed construction of the school to work transition literature, namely the stratification and standardization dimensions of the education system, and the more data oriented inequality of opportunity research of the economics of education. I collect several possible indicators for both dimensions to compa...