Jan Fidrmuc

University of Lille · Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences

This study analyses the causal relationship between education and subjective well-being by utilizing the 1997 educational reform in Turkey, which extended compulsory schooling from five to eight years. While the existing literature widely acknowledges the positive effects of education on employment opportunities, income levels, and health outcomes,...

We analyze the wellbeing socioeconomic 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 vio...

Does education make people more or less religious? The previous literature offers mixed findings on the relationship between education and religiosity. This may be due to endogeneity bias: education and religiosity can be caused by a third variable such as culture or upbringing. We instrument education by exposure to the 1997 education reform in Tu...

We utilize a natural experiment, an education reform increasing compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years in Turkey, to obtain endogeneity‐robust estimates of the effect of male education on the incidence of domestic violence against women. We find that husband's education lowers the probability of physical, emotional, and economic violence. Schooling...

This study assesses the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows on economic growth and domestic investment in a panel of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries during the period of 1990–2017 by utilizing the method of fixed-effects and system generalized method of moments (GMM). The findings show that FDI inflows are posit...

This article uses a survey amongst students at European universities to explore whether Russia's invasion of Ukraine has affected attitudes towards European integration. Some respondents completed the survey just before Russia's assault on 24 February 2022, and some did so just afterwards, thus delivering a quasi-experimental design situation, whic...

This article uses a survey amongst students at European universities to explore whether Russia's invasion of Ukraine has affected attitudes towards European integration. Some respondents completed the survey just before Russia's assault on 24 February 2022, and some did so just afterwards, thus delivering a quasi‐experimental design situation, whic...

Grandparenting duties can affect the well-being of the elderly both positively and negatively. This paper disentangles the interactions between grandparenting, quality of life, and life satisfaction in China. Using a panel dataset of 3205 respondents in three waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2011, 2013, and 20...

This paper uses a survey among students at European universities to explore whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has affected attitudes toward European integration. Some respondents completed the survey just before Russia’s assault on February 24, 2022, and some did so just afterwards, thus delivering a quasi-experimental design situation, which we...

In the programming period 2007-2013, the European Structural and Investment Fund (ESIF) invested €237 million in Slovak hospitals. We investigate whether this injection of additional funds has improved the quality of healthcare in the targeted hospitals. As a measure of quality, we use the readmission rate (ratio of readmissions within 30 days over...

This article investigates the spatial effect of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on urban–rural wage inequality, both in the short and long run, by employing the Spatial Durbin Model. In particular, we carefully consider the heterogeneity of inward FDI with respect to its entry mode (ownership type) and sectoral distribution. Based on a panel...

In this paper, we study the role of Confucius Institute in supporting internationalization of Chinese enterprises. Employing a panel dataset containing 66 Belt-Road countries and 75 non Belt-Road countries from 2006 to 2017, we find that Confucius Institute has had a positive effect on Chinese CMA in general and such an effect is stronger in Belt-R...

To shed light on the sustainable development of rural areas, we study the determinants of transitions from subsistence farming into either formal agricultural employment or agricultural entrepreneurship based on a recent nationally representative survey dataset. We pay particular attention to the roles of different capital endowments broadly includ...

This paper applies the gravity model to investigate the impacts of institutional quality coupled with political risks, distance, and socioeconomic factors on tourist flow. We find that institutional quality and absence of conflict are driving factors in fostering tourism flows for both source and destination countries. Our findings suggest that ins...

We explore the role played by Cohesion Policy in the Brexit referendum and the subsequent 2017 general election. Although the UK has been a net contributor to the EU, some regions receive significant amounts of regional aid funds. We find that while Cohesion Policy is positively correlated with the remain vote, this relationship is weak. Most of th...

We analyze the impact of EU structural and cohesion funds on economic growth of European regions, using 2SLS to tackle the potential problem of endogeneity, and estimating a spatial model to account for inter-regional spillovers. We use the presence of environmentally protected areas (under the European Union’s Natura 2000 program) as instruments f...

This article investigates how the legacy of colonization shapes the impact of inward FDI on employment in the Chinese labor market. The analysis utilizes provincial panel on overall employment and employment in the service sector from 2006 to 2015. We find that inward FDI significantly promotes employment and that this relationship is stronger in r...

We study the impact of physical attractiveness on productivity. Previous literature found a strong impact on wages and career progression, which can be either due to discrimination in favor of good-looking people or can reflect an association between attractiveness and productivity. We utilize a context where there is no or limited face-to-face int...

We analyze the impact of the national minimum wage (NMW) in the UK on the employment of young workers. We utilize the regression discontinuity approach to assess the impact of age-related increases in the NMW when workers turn 18 and 22. The previous literature has found little evidence of an adverse impact of the NMW on the UK labour market, both...

We consider the effect of physical attractiveness, assessed using publicly available pictures of top scientists, on their probability of winning the Nobel Prize. There is now an extensive body of literature that finds that physically attractive people receive non-negligible benefits in the labor market, marriage market and social life. In contrast,...

We study the causal effect of maternal education on childhood immunization rates. We use the Compulsory Education Law of 1997, and the differentiation in its implementation across regions, as instruments for schooling of young mothers in Turkey. The Compulsory Education Law increased the compulsory years of schooling of those born after 1986 from 5...

Parametric regression models are often not flexible enough to capture the true relationships as they tend to rely on arbitrary identification assumptions. Using the UK Labor Force Survey, the authors estimate the causal effect of national minimum wage (NMW) increases on the probability of job entry and job exit by means of a non-parametric Bayesian...

We investigate the relationship between unemployment and growth in China. We find considerable differences in the nature of this relationship across Chinese regions. We argue that this may reflect the different progress in transition across regions, in line with the Aghion-Blanchard model of optimal speed of transition. When we test this model, we...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of tourism on economic growth. Our analysis covers 133 countries over the period 1995 to 2007, including 32 countries highly dependent on tourism during that period. The results show that specialization in tourism per se had no significant effects on economic growth. However, countries that are...

We investigate the effect of IMF assistance on economic growth in a broad panel of countries. We argue that countries are likely self-select into seeking IMF involvement based on their economic performance. We control for such endogeneity by means of instrumental variables. Our findings indicate that the contemporaneous effect of the IMF involvemen...

Der politischen und ökonomischen Transformation in den ehemals kommunistischen Ländern Ost- und Mitteleuropas ging in den 1980er Jahren eine wirtschaftliche Stagnation voraus. Anfänglich hatte das sowjetische Modell der Zentralplanung ein beachtliches Wachstum hervorgebracht, das sich jedoch in den 1970er Jahren verlangsamte und dann ganz zum Erlie...

ndustrial policy is an important tool of economic policy-making, and this has been the case especially since the onset of the current global financial crisis in 2008. However, only relatively few empirical studies consider the macroeconomic effects of industrial policy, especially for European Union countries. In this study we investigate the effec...

Fiscal union often use fiscal transfers to counter asymmetric shocks but such transfers are often politically controversial. I present a model of a two-region fiscal union with region-specific shocks where the threat of secession imposes a limit on fiscal redistribution between regions. I show that both correlation of shocks across regions and thei...

Cultural factors and common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries. We show that widespread knowledge of languages is an important det...

We use four ways of the European Social Survey, covering 2000 to 2008, to analyze the effect of religion on happiness. Our findings confirm that religious individuals are generally happier than non-religious ones. When we seek to disentangle the effects of belonging to an organized religion from the effect of holding religious beliefs, we find that...

We use the UK Labor Force survey to investigate whether the socio-economic outcomes of people born on the 13th day of the month, and of those born on Friday the 13th, differ from the outcomes of people born on more auspicious days. In many European countries, including the UK, number 13 is considered unlucky and Friday the 13th is seen as an especi...

We use four ways of the European Social Survey, covering 2000 to 2008, to analyze the effect of religion on happiness. Our findings confirm that religious individuals are generally happier than non-religious ones. When we seek to disentangle the effects of belonging to an organized religion from the effect of holding religious beliefs, we find that...

We investigate the short-term effects of fiscal adjustment on economic activity in 20 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009. We compare two approaches: the traditional approach based on changes in cyclically adjusted primary balance (CAPB) and the narrative approach based on historical records. Proponents of the latter argue that it captures discretiona...

We revisit the relationship between financial development and economic growth in a panel of 52 middle-income countries over the 1980–2008 period. Using pooled mean group estimations in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting, we show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between finance and growth in the long run. In the short run, the rela...

Differences between the voting behavior of men and women have become one of the most significant issues in social science research in recent years. In this study, we examine whether there is gender gap in voting behavior in Turkey. Using European Social Survey data, we find that education level and religiosity are the main determinants of voting be...

We investigate the effect of financial development on economic growth in the context of Saudi Arabia, an oil-rich economy. In doing so, we distinguish between the effects of financial development on the oil and non-oil sectors of the economy. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds test technique, we find that financial development h...

Industrial policy is an important tool of economic policy-making, especially so since the onset of the current global financial crisis in 2008. However, only relatively few empirical studies consider the macroeconomic effects of industrial policy, especially for the European Union countries. In this study, we investigate the effect of state aid pol...

Differences between the voting behavior of men and women have become one of the most significant issues in social science research in recent years. In this study, we examine whether there is gender gap in voting behavior in Turkey by using ESS wave 2-2004 and ESS wave 4-2008 data sets. We find that education level and religiosity are the main eleme...

We revisit the relationship between financial development and economic growth in a panel of 52 middle-income countries over the 1980-2008 period. Using pooled mean group estimations in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting, we show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between finance and growth in the long run. In the short run, the rela...

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves can be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple theoretical model of informational spillovers and lea...

This paper investigates the changing nature of economic integration in China. Specifically, we consider business-cycle synchronization (correlation of demand and supply shocks) among Chinese provinces during the period 1955-2007. We find that the symmetry of supply shocks has declined after the liberalization initiated in 1978. In contrast, the cor...

We investigate the effect of financial development on economic growth in the context of Saudi Arabia, an oil-rich economy. In doing so, we distinguish between the effects of financial development on the oil and non-oil sectors of the economy. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds test technique, we find that financial development h...

The literature on estimating macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy requires suitable instruments to identify exogenous and unanticipated spending shocks. So far, the instrument of choice has been military build-ups. This instrument, however, largely limits the analysis to the US as few other countries have been involved in mainly extraterritorial...

We investigate the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks in Korea. We compare results obtained with two alternative approaches: the narrative approach and Structural Vector-Autoregressive model (SVAR). We propose a new methodology for identifying exogenous and unexpected fiscal shocks under the narrative approach: natural disasters an...

In this report, we analyze the impact of the national minimum wage (NMW) in the UK on employment of young workers. Our methodological approach is two-fold. First, we address the impact of the age-related increases in the NMW at the ages of 18 and 22: workers below these limits are subject to substantially lower rates than their older counterparts....

Reforms often occur in waves, seemingly cascading from country to country. We argue that such reform waves may be driven by informational spillovers: uncertainty about the outcome of reform is reduced by learning from the experience of similar countries. We motivate this hypothesis with a simple theoretical model and then test it empirically. Our r...

We investigate the effects of economic crises on the subsequent economic performance, economic reform, democratization and institutional change. Our analysis is based on a sample of post-communist countries, most of which experienced severe economic crises during the 1990s. We find that the severity of crisis has had a positive impact on the subseq...

Nearly two decades after the start of economic and political reforms in the former communist countries, the economic and political outcomes are very diverse. On the one hand, the countries of Central Europe and the Baltics were able, for the most part, to stabilize their economies after a few years of output fall and to recover their pre-1989 outpu...

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We argue that differences in height distributions, combined w...

This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society development under communism and divergence in the nature and pace of political and economic reform and transformation after 1989. We put together a unique data set on dissident activities for the 27 former centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the form...

Extensive multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the European Union (EU). However, a large number of languages (currently 23) hinders communication and imposes substantial financial and legal costs. On the other hand, the reduction of the number of languages would disenfranchise some or many EU citizens. We use t...

Migration flows are shaped by a complex combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms. In this paper, the authors analyze how existing diasporas (the stock of people born in a country and living in another one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current migration flows. The analysis exploits a bilateral data set on internat...

In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries to address these two issues. We study the effects of e...

We argue that econometric analyses based on transition countries’ data can be vulnerable to structural breaks across time and/or countries. We demonstrate this argument by identifying structural breaks in growth regressions estimated with data for 25 countries and 16 years. Our method allows identification of structural breaks at a-priori unknown p...