Working Papers

As labour-replacing technologies, such as industrial robots and AI-driven automats, alter the structure of labour demand, the task content of occupations has emerged as an increasingly important indicator of socioeconomic position. This study explores how exposure to job automation influences short-term marital intentions, using data from 1,345 respondents in the Czech Household Panel Survey (2015–2019) and occupational measures derived from the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) Database. Our findings reveal a gendered pattern: men employed in highly routine-intensive occupations—indicative of greater vulnerability to automation—are more likely to report no plans to marry. Conversely, women in similar jobs are more likely to express positive marital intentions. These results highlight how technological change not only alters labour market outcomes but also shapes demographic behaviours through the lens of gender norms. The study contributes to broader debates on the interplay between socioeconomic disadvantage and family formation, suggesting that automation may be contributing to a growing group of ‘non-marriageable’ men. As technological change continues to transform the labour markets, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, the number of individuals at risk of both economic and relational marginalization may further expand.
 

We examine the short-term fertility effects of Poland’s 2020 Constitutional Tribunal (CT) ruling, which declared abortions on the grounds of fetal anomaly unconstitutional. The decision effectively outlawed nearly all legal abortions, as over 97% had been conducted on this ground. Using vital statistics and interrupted time series analysis, we find a significant and immediate decline in births of around 6.6%. The fertility response was strongest among younger women and first-time mothers, suggesting heightened sensitivity to the increased risks of pregnancy. Contrary to expectations, highly educated women did not significantly adjust fertility, likely due to greater access to abortion services abroad. Our findings demonstrate that abortion bans may lower fertility when they substantially increase the perceived costs and risks of childbearing, particularly in societies with widespread contraceptive use. These results provide insights relevant to current debates in the United States, where overturning of Roe v. Wade may also reshape fertility patterns.

This pioneering study employs stated preference methods, specifically discrete choice experiments, to evaluate public preferences for the protection of diverse cultural heritage assets in Victoria, Australia. By analyzing responses to a series of hypothetical policy scenarios, we uncover the economic values the public assigns to various heritage attributes, including condition, accessibility, and protection measures. Our findings emphasize the importance of both use and non-use values in shaping willingness to pay for heritage conservation. These insights are critical for developing more effective, community-aligned heritage policies that reflect the public's valuation of cultural heritage. This research marks a significant advancement in the application of discrete choice experiments for general heritage valuation, offering a robust framework for future studies and policy development in cultural heritage preservation.

Understanding the value of cultural goods such as performing arts is essential for designing welfare-maximizing cultural policies. However, since these goods often generate public externalities, market data alone cannot capture their full value. While primary non-market valuation studies offer robust insights, they are resource-intensive. Benefit transfer (BT)—using value estimates from existing studies to assess unstudied contexts—offers a cost-effective alternative. This study examines the accuracy of BT in cultural economics, focusing on marginal values of theater performances. Using data from a discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted in six Polish provinces, we perform inter-provincial transfers of marginal willingness-to-pay values for four types of theater performances. By comparing transferred values with primary estimates, we assess BT’s validity and reliability. To our knowledge, this is the first BT study in cultural economics using DCE-derived marginal values. Our findings suggest that BT accuracy in culture aligns with results from more established fields, supporting the use of DCE-based estimates in cultural policy evaluation.

This paper addresses whether women’s employment in the 21st century remains a barrier to family formation, as it was in the 1980s and 1990s, or—similar to men’s—it has become a prerequisite for childbearing. We address this question through a systematic quantitative review (meta-analysis) of empirical studies conducted in Europe, North America and Australia. We selected 94 studies published between 1990-2023 (N=572 effect sizes). Our analysis uncovers a fundamental shift in the relationship between women's employment and fertility. What was once a strongly negative association has become statistically insignificant in the 2000s and 2010s—and even turned positive in the Nordic countries and parts of Western Europe (France, Belgium, and the Netherlands). This shift is evident both among childless women and mothers and has occurred across all analyzed country clusters, except in the German/Southern European group, where the relationship has remained negative. These findings challenge longstanding assumptions about work-family trade-offs and suggest a reconfiguration of the economic and social conditions underpinning fertility decisions in contemporary high-income societies. The paper calls for a reconceptualization of the employment-fertility relationship and development of a new theoretical framework that better captures these evolving dynamics in contemporary high-income societies.

This paper examines the effects of asset purchase programs (APPs) that were implemented in a number of countries during the COVID-19 pandemic in concert with large fiscal stimulus packages. We identify APP shocks for 14 advanced and emerging market economies using high-frequency identification techniques. We next estimate panel local projections, finding that APPs tend to stimulate output, but decrease prices. By using a Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, we demonstrate that these responses significantly depend on the magnitude of the simultaneously applied fiscal stimulus. Remarkably, higher government purchases during that period crowded in private consumption and had a large effect on inflation. We show that these empirical findings, some of which are inconsistent with a standard New Keynesian framework, can be rationalized in a simple general equilibrium model with segmented asset markets and fiscal dominance.

We estimate the impact of railway construction on local populations in Russian Poland in the 19th century. The initial wave of railway expansion outpaced economic demand. From the late 1860s onward, locations connected to the railway network experienced significantly higher population growth. The economic effects of the connection to the railway network increased over time. State-funded military railway lines generated a smaller impact than private-owned lines. We also study the impact of the railway connection on social mobility proxied through a number of notable people born in a given city. However, we do not identify any robust impact.
 

This paper estimates the role of six shocks originating in the United States in driving the international business cycle. To this end, it employs impulse response functions and forecast error variance decomposition from panel local projections. We find that key macroeconomic shocks originating in the United States contribute significantly to business cycle synchronization between the US and other economies. These shocks also account for a substantial part of output fluctuations in these economies. Considering individual shock contributions, we document that technology and monetary policy innovations are of the highest relevance.

This paper investigates the domestic and international transmission of U.S. fiscal news shocks emphasizing the importance of the sentiment channel for the global economy. We identify these shocks using federal government spending forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. Employing the local projection method, we find  that anticipated increases in U.S. government spending are expansionary domestically, leading to improved sentiment and enhanced financial conditions. On the other hand, the U.S. dollar appreciates, and the U.S. trade balance deteriorates when future fiscal expansion is expected. In the international context, we apply panel local projection models across a broad set of countries and show that positive sentiment and improved financial conditions driven by U.S. fiscal news spill over, stimulating demand and output growth in other economies. However, we find no significant effect of currency depreciation on net exports in a broad sample as rising domestic demand tends to boost imports. In turn, in a subsample of countries with high trade exposure to the U.S., the trade channel becomes significant, while financial channel diminishes in importance. At the same time, sentiment channel appears to play a significant role in all subsamples. Finally, we find that positive fiscal news shocks have strong stimulating effects (both domestic and international) during US recessions but not in expansions.

The theory of disruptive innovation has gained significant interest from the academic and business communities, investigating the reasons for inadequate or delayed responses of incumbents to innovation which challenges their established markets. Inadequate responses were explained by the concept of innovator’s dilemma, which postulates how incumbents tend to satisfy their consumers on the established markets, while overlooking opportunities with other consumers. However, the optimal incumbents’ response to disruptive innovation in the normative sense has not been researched. We investigate the choice of the payoff-maximizing strategy in response to the observed market disruption as a choice between different management approaches. Our study shows the importance of the speed of innovation adoption for the choice of the optimal response to innovation. We also show that the response can be delayed in some cases, reflecting the exploitation-exploration dilemma. This new insight complements the reasons of delayed response to disruptive innovation threats.

We provide the first estimate of the Polish national, regional and sectoral GDP in the interwar period. We find that the Polish economy's performance in the interwar period was much better than it was assumed before. In the years 1924 – 1938, the real GDP per capita increased by almost 40% or by 2.3% annually. As economic growth was stronger in the poorer regions significant regional convergence was achieved. Our results challenge the dominant narrative about the weak performance of the Polish economy in the interwar years.

We measure the value added in agriculture in Poland during the interwar period. Our calculation is based on the bottom-up methodology. We provide estimates on the national and regional levels. Cultivated area, yields and yields per hectare increased during the investigated period. Significant regional convergence, both in the case of prices and value added occurred. In the years 1924 -38 value added increased by 5.35% annually, resulting 4.01% per capita growth rate. However, the yields per hectare grew less than in a majority of other European economies. While less developed eastern regions caught up with more economically advanced western Poland, the leading west lost compared to European peers. Therefore, our assessment of the development of agriculture in Poland in that period remains mixed.

In the 21st century, advancements in technologies such as industrial robots have raised concerns about their impact on employment and wages, prompting extensive research. However, their effects on workers’ subjective well-being remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap ¬by examining whether workers experience a decline in well-being due to a loss of agency or maintain it by leveraging human skills to adapt to automation. Using data from the International Federation of Robotics, Eurostat, and the European Social Survey (2002–2018), we link robot density at the country-industry-year level to workers’ life satisfaction, happiness, job influence, and health. Employing an instrumental variables approach, we find that robot adoption negatively affects medium-educated workers’ well-being, particularly its eudaimonic dimension, supporting the decreasing agency thesis. In contrast, low- and highly educated workers experience positive effects. These impacts are more pronounced among women and weaker in countries with robust compensatory social policies.

The article investigates the usage of Informer architecture for building automated trading strategies for high frequency Bitcoin data. Three strategies using Informer model with different loss functions: Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Generalized Mean Absolute Directional Loss (GMADL) and Quantile loss, are proposed and evaluated against the Buy and Hold benchmark and two benchmark strategies based on technical indicators. The evaluation is conducted using data of various frequencies: 5 minute, 15 minute, and 30 minute intervals, over the 6 different periods. Although the Informer-based model with Quantile loss did not outperform the benchmark, two other models achieved better results. The performance of the model using RMSE loss worsens when used with higher frequency data while the model that uses novel GMADL loss function is benefiting from higher frequency data and when trained on 5 minute interval it beat all the other strategies on most of the testing periods. The primary contribution of this study is the application and assessment of the RMSE, GMADL and Quantile loss functions with the Informer model to forecast future returns, subsequently using these forecasts to develop automated trading strategies. The research provides evidence that employing an Informer model trained with the GMADL loss function can result in superior trading outcomes compared to the buy-and-hold approach.

This study investigates the distributional impacts of carbon taxes, traditionally examined through simulation studies on the regressivity of hypothetical tax scenarios. However, the dy-namic influence of actually implemented carbon taxes on consumption/income poverty and inequality in a cross-country setting has been less scrutinised. This paper assesses the effect of carbon taxes introduced in the past three decades in 15 European countries on consumption shares of the lowest decile groups, poverty rates and inequality indices. The analysis shows that a $40/ton CO2 tax covering 30% of emissions leads to a consumption share increase of up to 4% for the bottom 20% and 40% of the population, a trend that persisted for five years post-implementation, particularly in nations that efficiently redistribute carbon tax revenues. This resulted in a modest reduction in consumption inequality over three years. In contrast, the impact of carbon taxes on income poverty and inequality is not statistically significant. These findings suggest that concerns about poverty and inequality due to carbon taxes can be miti-gated by implementing a moderate tax combined with a strategically efficient revenue redis-tribution mechanism.

This paper examines Eurobarometer survey data from 27,438 individuals across 28 EU Member States in 2019 to evaluate the awareness and impact of EU Energy Labels. Specifically, we analyze the role of socioeconomic characteristics such as age, gender, education, financial stability, and political engagement. Our results suggest that individual characteristics have a greater effect on the influence of labels on purchase decisions than on label awareness. However, significant heterogeneity across countries persists even after controlling for individual characteristics. Using our model, we conduct three exercises in which we assume a policymaker can either increase label awareness among all unaware individuals or target those with specific characteristics, and we demonstrate the resulting impact on the share of people whose purchases are influenced by the label. The findings reveal that even when label awareness is at its highest level, it does not necessarily translate into substantially higher influence on purchasing decisions in some countries. Additionally, at the country level, certain socioeconomic and political variables are positively correlated with label awareness.
 

In this paper, we analyze the determinants of individual’s willingness to pay higher prices and taxes and to reduce their standard of living to support environmental protection. Using data from the 2020 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), Environment IV module from 26 countries on about 29,000 individuals, we investigate the influence of socio-demographic factors, consumer behavior, environmental beliefs, opinions, and attitudes. The findings reveal significant variations in willingness to bear financial burdens for environmental protection across different countries and socio-economic groups. Our analysis highlights the critical role of education, religion, political affiliation, and trust in institutions in shaping environmental attitudes and behaviors. Moreover, after controlling for individual characteristics, significant international disparities persist, with countries like India showing exceptionally high willingness across all measures, while many European countries, despite their progressive environmental policies, show lower willingness for higher taxes due to possibly already high tax burdens. These findings underscore the importance of tailoring policy communications to different socio-economic groups, emphasizing both the immediate and long-term benefits of environmental protection to enhance acceptance among various demographic segments.

We study substitution between fixed and mobile broadband services in South Africa using survey data on 134,000 individuals collected between 2009 and 2014. In our discrete-choice model, individuals choose fixed or mobile voice and data services in a framework that allows these services to be considered substitutes or complements. We find that there is substantial heterogeneity in the perception of these services as substitutes/complements. We use our model to simulate the uptake of fixed and mobile broadband across various demographic groups under different policy interventions, including: (i) a reduction in mobile data prices; (ii) an expansion in fixed-line coverage; (iii) a widespread distribution of computers; and (iv) broader internet access in schools and workplaces. Our results suggest that, when applied in isolation, these interventions do not significantly increase internet access among poorer households. In particular, the uptake of fixed broadband would remain limited, even if accessible to all households. This is because many households prefer mobile internet access, perceiving it as a substitute for fixed broadband.
 

In this paper, we investigate the effects of non-exclusive agreements between networks of mobile money agents on mobile network operator choices, using survey data from Tanzania conducted in 2017. By combining survey responses with geo-location data and information on agent proximity, we employ discrete choice models to analyze consumers’ decisions in subscribing to mobile network operators and their corresponding mobile money providers. Our findings highlight the significant influence of the distance to mobile money agents on consumers’ subscription choices. To explore the impact of interoperability (non-exclusivity) at the mobile money agent level, where consumers can use the nearest agent from any mobile money provider, we assess its effects on market shares of mobile network operators. Our results indicate that interoperability at the agent level has only a minor impact on market shares. Smaller operators experience marginal gains as their consumers can now utilize agents of larger providers, which are often closer in proximity. In conclusion, we find that interoperability at the agent level does not considerably alter the market structure in the context Tanzania during the period under consideration.
 

In this paper we analyse whether having a mobile phone impacts chances of getting employed. We use five waves of panel data from the National Income Dynamic Survey (NIDS), which was conducted in South Africa between years 2008 and 2017. In the estimation we include a vector of observable individual and household characteristics and account for unobserved heterogeneity amongst individuals. The estimation results suggest that mobile phone ownership has a positive impact on the change in employment status from unemployed to employed. On the other hand, ownership of a computer by a household and computer literacy do not increase the likelihood of getting employed. The average probability of becoming employed increases from 54.2% when no one among unemployed adults has a mobile phone to 57.4% when all of them have a mobile phone, which is an increase of 5.9%.