Working Papers

Seria wydawnicza WNE WORKING PAPERS prowadzona jest przez WNE UW od 2008 r. i jak dotąd opublikowano w niej ponad 400 prac.

Seria WNE Working Papers służy szybkiemu upowszechnianiu wyników badań prowadzonych na Wydziale Nauk Ekonomicznych UW. Publikowane tu teksty mają charakter wersji roboczych (pre-printów): mogą być uzupełniane lub poprawiane w miarę postępu prac nad tekstem i procesu wydawniczego. Prezentujemy aktualną wersję udostępnioną przez autorów, opatrzoną datą oraz identyfikatorami DOI/ISSN – co ułatwia jej cytowanie i śledzenie kolejnych iteracji. Każdy dokument zachowuje pełne prawa autorskie swoich twórców, a w przypadku późniejszych zmian, autorzy mogą w dowolnym momencie zamieścić zaktualizowany plik lub wskazać miejsce ostatecznego wydania.

Do serii WORKING PAPERS przyjmowane są artykuły pracowników naukowych WNE UW oraz publikacje z konferencji organizowanych na WNE UW. Artykuły powinny dotyczyć ekonomii, mieć charakter oryginalnych prac badawczych, nie być wcześniej publikowane. Przyjmowane są wyłącznie teksty w języku angielskim.

Prace prosimy przesyłać e-mailem na adres: $|j6QzDcdB.VHUa29R'sp=q8W&b]#[xl]|7i'TF/nI8lY{y[xkyzV.`tO

Prosimy przesyłać dwa pliki:

(1) główny tekst bez podania tytułu artykułu oraz autorów (plik DOC/DOCX) oraz

(2) stronę tytułową zawierającą: tytuł opracowania, autorów oraz ich afiliację (plik DOC/DOCX). 

Przed przesłaniem tekstu prosimy zapoznać się z szczegółowymi wymogami edycyjnymi.

Redaktorem wydawniczym serii Working Papers jest dr Maciej Bukowski.

Ilość wyników 509

WP(17/2026)511. When Politics Enters the Family: Electoral Outcomes and Fertility in the United Kingdom

Autorzy: Baszczak Łukasz, Weychert Ewa
This paper examines the relationship between political outcomes and fertility behavior by linking electoral results with individual-level fertility outcomes in the United Kingdom. Drawing and the narrative decision-making framework (Vignoli et al., 2…

WP511. When Politics Enters the Family: Electoral Outcomes and Fertility in the United Kingdom

This paper examines the relationship between political outcomes and fertility behavior by linking electoral results with individual-level fertility outcomes in the United Kingdom. Drawing and the narrative decision-making framework (Vignoli et al., 2020; Johnson, Bilovich, & Tuckett, 2023) and the role of political polarization in fertility outcomes (Dahl et al. 2022) it considers how alignment between one’s political preferences and the actual party in power shapes fertility behaviour. Specifically, the study tests whether this alignment increases the probability of a first birth using longitudinal data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) over the period 1991–2020. We derive the month of conception from respondents’ birth histories and combine this information with measures of their political preferences (extrapolated to account for every month in the studied period). The results of a complementary log-log model indicate that the probability of conception is higher when an individual’s preferred party is in government.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.17.511
Baszczak Łukasz, Weychert Ewa
fertility uncertainty narrative decision theory voting behavior United Kingdom

WP(16/2026)510. Two Blind Walls: A Transferable Pedagogical Design for Art-Market Literacy Across Art and Economics Education

Autorzy: Kopczewski Tomasz, Laskowska-Lisicka Justyna, Lisicki Jan, Okhrimenko Kostiantyn, Potocki Tomasz
This article presents an ongoing pedagogical project at the intersection of economics and art education. It starts from a double blind wall: economics rarely uses the art market as a eaching laboratory, while art education often protects aesthetic ju…

WP510. Two Blind Walls: A Transferable Pedagogical Design for Art-Market Literacy Across Art and Economics Education

This article presents an ongoing pedagogical project at the intersection of economics and art education. It starts from a double blind wall: economics rarely uses the art market as a eaching laboratory, while art education often protects aesthetic judgement from market reductionism. We propose a transferable protocol combining diagnostic questions, valuation tasks, anchoring and signalling treatments, public-art perception probes, and dashboard feedback. Its first implementation uses Wojciech Fangor in Warsaw. The aim is not representative measurement, but a replicable design through which students observe how attention, information, narrative, and market signals shape the encounter with art.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.16.510
Kopczewski Tomasz, Laskowska-Lisicka Justyna, Lisicki Jan, Okhrimenko Kostiantyn, Potocki Tomasz
art valuation economics education art education anchoring signalling asymmetric information pedagogical narrative laboratory Know Thyself Wojciech Fangor replication

WP(15/2026)509. Capturing zero-price effects in stated choice surveys: implications for willingness-to-pay and welfare

Autorzy: Tjiong Jeff, Dekker Thijs, Hess Stephane, Giergiczny Marek, Ojeda-Cabral Manuel, Czajkowski Mikołaj
Stated choice surveys commonly used in public policy appraisal – such as in transport or environmental economics – often contrast a ‘free’ status quo alternative against a range of (policy) interventions which can be implement…

WP509. Capturing zero-price effects in stated choice surveys: implications for willingness-to-pay and welfare

Stated choice surveys commonly used in public policy appraisal – such as in transport or environmental economics – often contrast a ‘free’ status quo alternative against a range of (policy) interventions which can be implemented at a cost. Limited attention has, however, been paid to the fact that the ‘free’ nature of the status quo (SQ) alternative may make the SQ alternative overly attractive due to the zero-price (ZP) effect. The ZP effect is a well-established notion in behavioural economics explaining the phenomenon that individuals tend to over-react to free alternatives. We present an experimental design setup allowing the separation of the ZP effect from the SQ effect together with the identification of non-linear sensitivities to costs. Choices made by students between different mobile broadband packages are used for illustrational purposes. Our analysis shows that the ZP effect is significant and the observed preference to remain in the SQ is largely due to the ZP effect. In practice, this may lead to biased welfare estimates for public policy packages if the ZP effect is not explicitly accounted for. Moreover, we also show that misspecification of the functional form for cost can lead to significant bias in WTP estimates and the ZP and SQ effects.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.15.509
Tjiong Jeff, Dekker Thijs, Hess Stephane, Giergiczny Marek, Ojeda-Cabral Manuel, Czajkowski Mikołaj
zero-price effect stated choice experiments status quo bias willingness-to-pay welfare analysis discrete choice modelling non-linear cost sensitivity Box-Cox transformation mobile broadband

WP(14/2026)508. Know Thyself: A Methodological Manifesto for Teaching Microeconomics Through Epistemic Provocation

Autorzy: Kopczewski Tomasz
This paper documents and formalises the Know Thyself method, a teaching approach developed through more than thirty years of university teaching practice. Its starting diagnosis is that students often learn economic models without experiencing the as…

WP508. Know Thyself: A Methodological Manifesto for Teaching Microeconomics Through Epistemic Provocation

This paper documents and formalises the Know Thyself method, a teaching approach developed through more than thirty years of university teaching practice. Its starting diagnosis is that students often learn economic models without experiencing the assumptions that make those models necessary. The method reverses the usual sequence: experience before theory, data as a mirror before abstraction, and questions before answers. Its empirical core is not the experiment narrowly understood, but ad hoc research: classroom experiments, surveys, simulations, valuation tasks, and replication laboratories that make learners’ own assumptions visible. Four case studies — expected value, ergodicity, market equilibrium, and the rationality of altruism — illustrate how the method converts declarative knowledge into reflective practice. Artificial intelligence gives the method scale by lowering the cost of surveys, dashboards, simulations, and replication protocols. The paper’s practical conclusion is simple: change the order. Ask first. Teach later.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.14.508
Kopczewski Tomasz
economics education epistemic provocation experiential learning replication expected value ergodicity market equilibrium AI in education science curiosity

WP(13/2026)507. Did Living Standards Converge? Beyond GDP in Post-Socialist Europe and Russia

Autorzy: Brzeziński Michał
Three decades after the fall of communism, GDP convergence is widely cited as evidence that the post-socialist transition succeeded. But GDP is a narrow measure of living standards. This paper asks whether convergence toward Western Europe holds up o…

WP507. Did Living Standards Converge? Beyond GDP in Post-Socialist Europe and Russia

Three decades after the fall of communism, GDP convergence is widely cited as evidence that the post-socialist transition succeeded. But GDP is a narrow measure of living standards. This paper asks whether convergence toward Western Europe holds up once health, inequality, and leisure are also taken into account. We construct a comprehensive welfare measure for Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Russia, benchmarked against Germany, covering the 1980s through 2022. In every country, welfare relative to Germany falls well below what GDP alone would suggest. Russia’s welfare stands at roughly half its GDP level, driven by the post-Soviet mortality crisis and extreme inequality—challenging characterisations of Russia as a “normal” middle-income country. Hungary, conventionally grouped with the Visegrad convergence successes, suffers a substantial welfare shortfall driven by decades of poor health outcomes. Poland emerges as the strongest performer in convergence dynamics. Life expectancy is the largest contributor to this gap.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.13.507
Brzeziński Michał
welfare measurement Eastern Europe Russia transition economies living standards life expectancy inequality

WP(12/2026)506. Cultural Divides and Populist Voting: Evidence from a Global Panel

Autorzy: Brzeziński Michał
Cultural heterogeneity—the within-country dispersion of values measured across hundreds of survey items—predicts populist voting across 60 democracies from 1970 to 2019. I compute fractionalization and polarization indices on Integrated V…

WP506. Cultural Divides and Populist Voting: Evidence from a Global Panel

Cultural heterogeneity—the within-country dispersion of values measured across hundreds of survey items—predicts populist voting across 60 democracies from 1970 to 2019. I compute fractionalization and polarization indices on Integrated Values Survey value items and regress three populism measures on these indices in a dynamic two-way fixed-effects panel with country-level clustering. A one-within-country-standard-deviation increase in cultural polarization is associated with a rise in vote-weighted ideational populism of about 14\ robust to system-GMM and to a sensitivity analysis for selection on unobservables. A V-Party-based GAL–TAN decomposition shows that the mobilization skews toward culturally-authoritarian parties, with no detectable movement in the progressive-libertarian camp. Including behavioral items in the heterogeneity measure eliminates the effect; the values-versus-behaviors boundary is empirically decisive.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.12.506
Brzeziński Michał
populism cultural heterogeneity fractionalization polarization GAL–TAN

WP(11/2026)505. Climate change narratives and first births in the UK

Autorzy: Weychert Ewa, Vignoli Daniele, Matysiak Anna, Celińska-Kopczyńska Dorota
This study investigates how climate news exposure relates to first-birth outcomes in the United Kingdom. Drawing on theories of imagined futures, individualized political engagement, and eco-anxiety, we examine whether and how exposure to climate-rel…

WP505. Climate change narratives and first births in the UK

This study investigates how climate news exposure relates to first-birth outcomes in the United Kingdom. Drawing on theories of imagined futures, individualized political engagement, and eco-anxiety, we examine whether and how exposure to climate-related media coverage is related to fertility behavior. We construct a novel index of climate news coverage using text mining and link it to individual-level longitudinal data from the UK Understanding Society survey. Results show that high exposure to climate news is associated with a lower probability of first birth, but only among individuals who express strong pro-environmental attitudes. In contrast, political identity and perceived long-term climate risk do not significantly moderate this relationship. These findings suggest that climate news coverage, which we use as a proxy for climate change narratives, is associated with fertility in a non-uniform way, shaped by moral and emotional mechanisms linked to current environmental concern. This study highlights the role of media-driven imaginaries in shaping life course decisions and contributes new evidence on the demographic implications of climate change discourse.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.11.505
Weychert Ewa, Vignoli Daniele, Matysiak Anna, Celińska-Kopczyńska Dorota
climate change fertility outcomes text mining

WP(10/2026)504. Clashing narratives about economic inequality in the economic and sociological textbooks

Autorzy: Weychert Ewa, Kopczewski Tomasz
Students of introductory economics courses pointed out that economic inequality the most significant challenge in the 21st century (Bowles & Carlin, 2020). However, there is limited research on how this issue is portrayed in introductory textbook…

WP504. Clashing narratives about economic inequality in the economic and sociological textbooks

Students of introductory economics courses pointed out that economic inequality the most significant challenge in the 21st century (Bowles & Carlin, 2020). However, there is limited research on how this issue is portrayed in introductory textbooks. Our study aims to investigate the presentation of economic inequality in economics textbooks compared to sociological ones. We conduct a mixed-method study to examine differences in how introductory economics and sociology textbooks portray economic inequality. By focusing on the comparison between economic and sociological textbooks, we aim to highlight the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to studying economic inequalities, as advocated by economist Thomas Piketty (Korom, 2019). Comparing textbooks across disciplines is essential for informing curriculum development, encouraging interdisciplinary learning, and enhancing the relevance of education to real-world issues. This comparison provides insights that help integrate diverse perspectives on economic inequality into educational practices in both disciplines. Our analysis includes twelve introductory economics textbooks and three introductory sociological textbooks. We find significant differences: top-selling economics textbooks focus on statistical measurements of inequality and the trade-off between equality and efficiency, while sociological textbooks consider economic inequality from historical, cultural, and philosophical perspectives.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.10.504
Weychert Ewa, Kopczewski Tomasz
income inequality wealth inequality textbook analysis narrative economics qualitative research

WP(9/2026)503. Topology and Economics: from Sard’s Theorem to Social Choice

Autorzy: Ryłow Jakub
This paper provides a synthetic survey of applications of differential, algebraic, and general topology in mathematical economics, with particular emphasis on empirically verifiable results. We argue that topological machinery is intrinsically necess…

WP503. Topology and Economics: from Sard’s Theorem to Social Choice

This paper provides a synthetic survey of applications of differential, algebraic, and general topology in mathematical economics, with particular emphasis on empirically verifiable results. We argue that topological machinery is intrinsically necessary on three levels. First, Smale’s proof of Walrasian equilibrium existence without convexity assumptions, and the local uniqueness result for generic economies, require Sard’s theorem and the preimage theorem; the classical Arrow–Debreu existence proof uses fixed-point methods (Kakutani) but not the full differential apparatus. Second, identifiability of structural models — including optimal-transport labour market models, partially identified models, and nonparametric IV regression — is equivalent to specific topological properties of the parameter space (connectedness, contractibility, vanishing of higher homotopy groups). Third, applying persistent homology to financial time series yields leading crisis indicators: the persistence landscape norm of H₁ barcodes rises 3–8 weeks before market crashes. Together, these results trace a path from Brouwer’s theorem and Chichilnisky–Heal homotopy groups through the outer Hausdorff metric in location theory to the topology of interbank liability networks in systemic risk analysis.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.9.503
Ryłow Jakub
differential topology Walrasian equilibrium Sard’s theorem persistent homology social choice theory optimal transport Hausdorff metric

WP(8/2026)502. Keynes vs. Kolmogorov: Two Axiomatics of Probability

Autorzy: Ryłow Jakub
The paper examines the logical theory of probability formulated by John Maynard Keynes in A Treatise on Probability (1921) as an axiomatic project competing with the measure-theoretic approach to probability codified by Andrei Kolmogorov in Grundbegr…

WP502. Keynes vs. Kolmogorov: Two Axiomatics of Probability

The paper examines the logical theory of probability formulated by John Maynard Keynes in A Treatise on Probability (1921) as an axiomatic project competing with the measure-theoretic approach to probability codified by Andrei Kolmogorov in Grundbegriffe der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung (1933). We present the structure of both approaches, identify the key divergences — the epistemological interpretation of the probabilistic relation, Keynes’s rejection of full numerability, the status of conditional probability, and the concept of the weight of evidence — and analyse the reasons for Kolmogorov’s triumph. We survey four contemporary interpretive traditions: subjective Bayesianism, frequentism, logical probability, and imprecise probabilities. Particular attention is paid to current applications — from Bayesian inference in machine learning and decision theory under uncertainty, to catastrophe risk pricing and uncertainty management in climate models. We argue that Keynes’s intuitions, long neglected, are gaining new significance in the face of the epistemic challenges of the twenty-first century.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.8.502
Ryłow Jakub
logical probability measure theory weight of evidence imprecise probabilities Bayesianism