Working Papers

The WNE Working Papers series has been published by the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw since 2008.

The WNE Working Papers series provides a fast, open channel for disseminating research conducted at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw. The papers hosted here are working versions (pre-prints) and may evolve as authors refine their analyses, incorporate feedback, or progress through formal peer-review. What you read is the current version released by the authors, timestamped and assigned DOI/ISSN identifiers to ensure precise citation and version tracking. Copyright remains with the authors, who may, at any time, upload a revised file or add a note directing readers to a later, peer-reviewed publication.

The Working Papers series accepts articles by research employees of the Faculty and publications from conferences organised at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw. Articles should be original research papers which have not been previously published, on the subject of economics.

Please send your paper by e-mail: 17S!'MF6Op#KV*-at}N0e~A5ZsR]#[&%Fkl8*%-ak=JE!PZ+D'nd|#cd? 

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(1) the main text without the title of the article and the authors (DOC/DOCX file) and

(2) the title page including: the title of the paper, the authors and their affiliation (DOC/DOCX file).

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Number of Results 14

WP(35/2026)529. When Work Moves Home: Fertility Responses to Working from Home in Europe

Authors: Osiewalska Beata, Matysiak Anna
This study examines the role of working from home (WFH) in shaping fertility across Austria, France, and Poland. While WFH can enhance flexibility and facilitate work–family reconciliation, it may also blur boundaries and intensify work demands…

WP529. When Work Moves Home: Fertility Responses to Working from Home in Europe

This study examines the role of working from home (WFH) in shaping fertility across Austria, France, and Poland. While WFH can enhance flexibility and facilitate work–family reconciliation, it may also blur boundaries and intensify work demands, with ambiguous implications for childbearing. Using longitudinal Labour Force Survey (2006–2023), we estimate hazard models of first and subsequent births, distinguishing women’s and men’s on-site work, occasional and usual WFH, self-employment, and non-employment, as well as their couple-level configurations. The association between WFH and fertility is strongly context-, gender-, and parity-specific. For first births, women’s WFH is positively associated with entry into parenthood in France and Austria, but negatively in Poland, particularly when combined with temporary employment. For subsequent births, women’s WFH is linked to higher birth risks in France and Austria, whereas in Poland, this pattern appears only when she works from home and he works on-site. Men’s WFH shows little association with fertility. These findings highlight that WFH operates as both a resource and a strain: supportive policies and secure employment can turn WFH into a facilitator of family formation, whereas their absence may transform it into a source of constraint and inequality.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2026.35.529
Osiewalska Beata, Matysiak Anna
work from home flexible work fertility couples Europe

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

Authors: 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(2/2025)465. Agriculture in interwar Poland: development in a turbulent time

Authors: Bukowski Maciej, Kowalski Michał, Marcin Wroński
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 …

WP465. Agriculture in interwar Poland: development in a turbulent time

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.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2025.2.465
Bukowski Maciej, Kowalski Michał, Marcin Wroński
agriculture national income Poland Central and Eastern Europe economic growth regional convergence

WP(1/2025)464. Industrial robots and workers’ well-being in Europe

Authors: Bogusz Honorata, Daniela Bellani
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 underexpl…

WP464. Industrial robots and workers’ well-being in Europe

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.


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2025.1.464 WNE_WP464.pdf
Bogusz Honorata, Daniela Bellani
industrial robots well-being life satisfaction Europe education

WP(25/2024)461. Awareness and Impact of Energy Labels on Purchases of Household Appliances in the EU

Authors: Monica Barahona-Varon, Toker Doganoglu, Grzybowski Łukasz
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,…

WP461. Awareness and Impact of Energy Labels on Purchases of Household Appliances in the EU

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.
 


DOI: https://doi.org/10.33138/2957-0506.2024.25.461
Monica Barahona-Varon, Toker Doganoglu, Grzybowski Łukasz
European Green Deal Ecodesign Directive Energy-efficiency

WP(12/2023)419. Structural Labour Market Change and Gender Inequality in Earnings

Authors: Matysiak Anna, Hardy Wojciech, van der Velde Lucas Augusto
Research from the US argues that women will benefit from a structural labour market change as the importance of social tasks increases and that of manual tasks declines. This article contributes to this discussion in three ways: (a) by extending the …

WP419. Structural Labour Market Change and Gender Inequality in Earnings

Research from the US argues that women will benefit from a structural labour market change as the importance of social tasks increases and that of manual tasks declines. This article contributes to this discussion in three ways: (a) by extending the standard framework of task content of occupations in order to account for diversity of social tasks; (b) by developing measures of occupational task content tailored to the European context; and (c) by testing this argument in 13 European countries. Data are analysed from the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations Database and the European Structure of Earnings Survey. The analysis demonstrates that relative to men the structural labour market change improves earnings potential of women working in low- and middle-skilled occupations but not those in high-skilled occupations. Women are overrepresented in low paid social tasks (e.g. care) and are paid less for analytical tasks than men.


Matysiak Anna, Hardy Wojciech, van der Velde Lucas Augusto
task content of occupations care work wages gender Europe

WP(26/2022)402. Industrial robots and fertility in European countries

Authors: Matysiak Anna, Bellani Daniela, Bogusz Honorata
In this study we examine whether the long-term structural changes in the labour market, driven by automation, affect fertility. Adoption of industrial robots in the EU has tripled since the mid-1990s, tremendously changing the conditions of participa…

WP402. Industrial robots and fertility in European countries

In this study we examine whether the long-term structural changes in the labour market, driven by automation, affect fertility. Adoption of industrial robots in the EU has tripled since the mid-1990s, tremendously changing the conditions of participating in the labour market. On the one hand, new jobs are created, benefitting largely the highly skilled workers. On the other hand, the growing turnover in the labour market and changing content of jobs induce fears of job displacement and make workers continuously adjust to new requirements (reskill, upskill, increase work efforts). The consequences of these changes are particularly strong for the employment and earning prospects of the low and middle educated workers. Our focus is on six European countries: Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom. We link regional data on fertility and employment structures by industry from Eurostat (NUTS-2) with data on robot adoption from the International Federation of Robotics. We estimate fixed effects linear models with instrumental variables in order to account for the external shocks which may affect fertility and robot adoption in parallel. Our findings suggest robots tend to exert a negative impact on fertility in highly industrialised regions, regions with relatively low educated populations and those which are technologically less advanced. At the same time, better educated and prospering regions may even experience fertility improvements as a result of the technological change. The family and labour market institutions of the country may further moderate these effects.


Matysiak Anna, Bellani Daniela, Bogusz Honorata
fertility employment industrial robots technological change Europe

WP(14/2020)320. Why wealth inequality differs between post-socialist countries?

Authors: Brzeziński Michał, Sałach Katarzyna
We provide the first attempt to understand how differences in households' socio-demographic and economic characteristics account for disparities in wealth inequality between five post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. We use 2013…

WP320. Why wealth inequality differs between post-socialist countries?

We provide the first attempt to understand how differences in households' socio-demographic and economic characteristics account for disparities in wealth inequality between five post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. We use 2013/2014 data from the second wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) and the reweighted Oaxaca-Blinder-like decompositions based on recentered influence function (RIF) regressions. Our results show that the differences in homeownership rates account for up to 42% of the difference in wealth inequality measured with the Gini index and for as much as 63-109% in case of the P50/P25 percentile ratio. Differences in homeownership rates are related to alternative designs of housing tax policies but could be also driven by other factors. We correct for the problem of the 'missing rich' in household surveys by calibrating the HFCS survey weights to top wealth shares adjusted using wealth data from national rich lists. Empirically, the correction procedure strengthens the importance of homeownership rates in accounting for cross-country wealth inequality differences, which suggests that our results are not sensitive to the significant underestimation of top wealth observations in the HFCS.


Brzeziński Michał, Sałach Katarzyna
wealth inequality decomposition recentered influence function (RIF) regressions survey weight calibration Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) post-socialist transition Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) housing homeownership missing rich

WP(9/2019)294. Wealth inequality in Central and Eastern Europe: evidence from joined household survey and rich lists’ data

Authors: Brzeziński Michał, Sałach Katarzyna, Wroński Marcin
We study how the problem of the 'missing rich', the underrepresentation of the wealthiest in household surveys, affects wealth inequality estimates for the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The survey data from the…

WP294. Wealth inequality in Central and Eastern Europe: evidence from joined household survey and rich lists’ data

We study how the problem of the 'missing rich', the underrepresentation of the wealthiest in household surveys, affects wealth inequality estimates for the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The survey data from the second wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) are joined with the data from the national rich lists for Esto-nia, Hungary, Latvia, Poland and Slovakia. Pareto distribution is fitted to the joined survey and rich lists' data to impute the missing observations for the largest wealth values. We provide the first estimates of the top-corrected wealth inequality for the CEE region in 2013/2014. Despite a short period of wealth accumulation during the post-1989 market economy period, our adjust-ment procedure reveals that wealth inequality in the Baltic countries is comparable to that of Germany (one of the most wealth unequal countries in Europe), while in Poland and Hungary it has reached levels observed in France or Spain. We discuss possible explanations of these find-ings with reference to the speed and range of privatization processes, extent of income inequali-ty, and the role of inheritances and wealth taxes in the region.


Brzeziński Michał, Sałach Katarzyna, Wroński Marcin
wealth inequality missing rich Pareto distribution rich lists Forbes Household Finance and Consumption Survey transition countries Central and Eastern Europe

WP(20/2018)279. Regulation of Geo-blocking: does it address the problem of low intraEU iTrade?

Authors: Mazur Joanna, Śledziewska Katarzyna, Zięba Damian
The goal of the article is to critically verify and to discuss main areas necessary for increasing intraEU iTrade. To achieve this aim, the legal analysis of the regulation is confronted with the econometric approach identifying the main determinants…

WP279. Regulation of Geo-blocking: does it address the problem of low intraEU iTrade?

The goal of the article is to critically verify and to discuss main areas necessary for increasing intraEU iTrade. To achieve this aim, the legal analysis of the regulation is confronted with the econometric approach identifying the main determinants of cross-border e-commerce. The model is based on data from a survey conducted among 6901 Polish business owners in 2017. Our hypotheses include the following issues: (1) the main barrier of intraEU iTrade is the low level of integration of digital technologies by SMEs; therefore (2) the character of the impact of legal means adopted in the regulation 2018/302 on the development of transnational service provision and entrepreneurship based on e-commerce is doubtful. We argue that the introduction of more and more advanced requirements by EC will only reduce their interest in developing business abroad through cross-border e-commerce and result in losing the opportunities linked to the development of digital economy.


DOI: http://doi.org.10.26405/WP/WNE/2018/279/020
Mazur Joanna, Śledziewska Katarzyna, Zięba Damian
intraEU iTrade cross-border e-commerce; geo-blocking; digital economy; DSM; European Union
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