Hubert János Kiss

• Phd (Universidad de Alicante, 2009)
• Senior research fellow & Professor (Associate) at KRTK KTI & Corvinus University of Budapest

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. 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 solutio...

We show the evolution of the delay of gratification (DG) in 950 students aged 10–14 during coronavirus-induced home-based online education, by analysing data from two waves of voluntary online surveys. Students in the highest SES category experienced an absolute increase in DG, whereas those in the lowest SES category suffered a decrease, resulting...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. 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 solutio...

Collective action problems emerge when individual incentives and group interests are misaligned, as in the case of climate change. Individuals involved in these problems are often considered to have two options: contribute towards public solutions such as global mitigation or free ride. However, many collective action problems today involve a third...

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...

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...

Using different variants of the classic climate game, we investigate the role of competition and the source of endowment (windfall vs. earned). Participants completed a detailed personality test (including climate attitudes and economic preferences) before the experiment and were asked about their strategies after-wards. We find that competition di...

A growing body of experimental literature investigates how student-level background characteristics are associated with dishonest behavior in early adolescence. However, results from prior studies are mixed. To revisit earlier findings, we conducted a comprehensive literature review and executed two consecutive, large-scale, incentivized surveys in...

Economic decisions depend on economic expectations. Using Hungarian monthly survey data between 2000 and 2009, we show that the relationship between expectations (both at the macroeconomic and household levels) and socioeconomic status (SES), as represented by income rank and education level, is non-linear. In many instances, there is no significan...

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...

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...

The theoretical literature on bank runs has modeled depositors’ withdrawal decision as a one-off choice, made simultaneously by all depositors. Our game-theoretic framework gives depositors a heterogeneous, stochastic opportunity to change their minds about withdrawing their money. They can run out of (or run into) the crowd in front of the bank ba...

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,...

We study experimentally cooperation in group contests under a new sharing rule that captures elements of coopetitive setups that are often characterized by the tension between cooperation and competition. It introduces an allocation of the obtained prize which is inversely proportional to individual efforts. We use it to study if the pervasive over...

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...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries eased the burden on borrowers through loan forbearance. Using a representative sample of the Hungarian adult population, we investigate whether time preferences and locus of control are associated with loan forbearance takeup. We find evidence that time discounting correlates with the resort to forbearan...

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...

We study experimentally an instrument to prevent bank runs in healthy banks. In particular, we extend the basic bank-run game, where depositors choose between withdraw or keeping their money deposited, with a third option, the possibility to relocate funds to a priority account that is less profitable, but which guarantees a payoff even in a bank r...

We study how lines form in front of banks. In our model, depositors choose first the level of effort to arrive early at the bank and then whether or not to withdraw their deposit. We argue that the informational environment (i.e., the possibility of observing the action of others) affects the emergence of bank runs and should, therefore, influence...

Sorting according to the gender or cognitive abilities of the traders has been investigated as a potential source of overpricing in asset markets. Here we study if sorting according to risk attitudes matters, motivated by the fact that filtering out risk-averse investors is practiced widely in Europe and is in line with the Markets in Financial Ins...

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 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...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries eased the burden of borrowers through loan forbearance. Using a representative sample of the Hungarian adult population, we investigate if time discounting and locus of control predict who takes up loan forbearance. We find convincing evidence that time discouting associates with the resort to forbearanc...

Motivated by the two-decade-long scientific debate over the existence of the ego-depletion effect, our paper contributes to exploring the scope conditions of ego-depletion theory. Specifically, in a randomized experiment, we depleted students’ self-control with a cognitively demanding task that required students’ effort. We measured the effect of d...

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...

We conduct two waves (W1 and W2) of an unincentivized online survey to measure the change in altruism of primary school students (N = 983) towards classmates and schoolmates during the school closures due to COVID-19. The W1 responses arrived, on average, after 39 days of online education, while W2 responses arrived, on average, 31 days after W1. T...

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...

In this paper we show experimentally that conditional cooperation, a phenomenon described in the private provision of public goods, is also present in group contests, where participants’ contributions to their group performance partially determines if they overcome a rival group. This environment allows us to identify new determinants of conditiona...

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 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...

We study experimentally if conditional cooperation occurs in group contests and how it is affected by 1) winning or losing the contest; and 2) if the group won or lost by chance or deservedly. We find that conditional cooperation prevails in group contests unconditionally and also if we control for the outcome of the contest, except when participan...

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...

In a Diamond–Dybvig type model of financial intermediation, we allow depositors to announce at a positive cost to subsequent depositors that they keep their funds deposited in the bank. Theoretically, the mere availability of public announcements (and not its use) ensures that no bank run is the unique equilibrium outcome. Multiple equilibria—inclu...

This is the Chinese translation of "Depositors’ Behaviour in Times of Mass Deposit Withdrawals "

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...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze how response time in a laboratory experiment on bank runs affects withdrawal decisions. Design/methodology/approach In the authors’ setup, the bank has no fundamental problems, depositors decide sequentially whether to keep the money in the bank or to withdraw, and they may observe previous decisions...

There are situations in which competitors ally to pursue a common objective. This simultaneous presence of cooperation and competition is called coope-tition and we study it theoretically and experimentally in a group contest setup. More concretely, we analyze a group contest with a new sharing rule, that we call inverse proportional. This rule emb...

A recent stream of experimental economics literature studies the factors that contribute to the emergence of financial bubbles. We consider a setting where participants sorted according to their degree of risk aversion trade in experimental asset markets. We show that risk sorting is able to explain bubbles partially: Markets with the most risk-tol...

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...

We propose a discrete time probabilistic model of depositor behavior which takes into account the information flow among depositors. In each time period each depositors’ current state is determined in a stochastic way, based on their previous state, the state of other connected depositors, and the strategy of the bank. The bank offers payment to im...

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)

During financial crisis, depositors and investors react quickly to the enviroment, thus financial authorities do often rely on the suspension of convertibility (i.e., freezing deposits) to prevent bank runs episodes. However, it is unclear how response time shapes decisions during bank runs. To cover this gap, we report experimental evidence on the...

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...

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...

Success in life is determined to a large extent by school performance, which in turn depends heavily on grades obtained in exams. In this study, we investigate a particular type of exam: multiple-choice tests. More concretely, we study if patterns of correct answers in multiple-choice tests affect performance. We design an experiment to study if st...

A distinctive feature of recent revolutions was the key role of social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). In this paper, we study its role in mobilization. We assume that social media allow potential participants to observe the individual participation decisions of others, while traditional mass media allow potential participants to see on...

We provide experimental evidence that panic bank runs occur in the absence of problems with fundamentals and coordination failures among depositors, the two main culprits identified in the literature. Depositors withdraw when they observe that others do so, even when theoretically they should not. Our findings suggest that panic also manifests itse...

We propose a discrete time probabilistic model of depositor behavior which takes into account the information flow among depositors. In each time period each depositors’ current state is determined in a stochastic way, based on its previous state, the state of other connected depositors and the strategy of the bank. The bank offers payment to impat...

Empirical descriptions and studies suggest that generally depositors observe a sample of previous decisions before deciding if to keep their funds deposited or to withdraw them. These observed decisions may exhibit different degrees of correlation across depositors. In our model depositors decide sequentially and are assumed to follow the law of sm...

S1_File.7z contains the program code of all simulations in this paper. The simulations are programmed in Repast 3, an agent-based modeling toolkit available at http://repast.sourceforge.net/repast3/. To run the program, one needs a Java Builder, such as Eclipse (available at https://eclipse.org/). After downloading these two programs, a new Java pr...

Thousands of depositors crowd in the door of a bank branch. “Where is our money?” they shout enraged. “We want our money back!” The scene, besides being part of the classic movie “It’s a wonderful life” (Frank Capra, 1946), reflects a reality that many people believed distant but that has re-arisen strongly in recent years. We refer to bank runs.