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I use rigorous thinking and deep analytical skills given by my academic background to translate data into stories. I have more than 10 years of experience in data analysis by using different software. I defended my doctoral thesis at Central European University and joined the Hungarian Academy of Science in 2020. I hold an MA in Economics both from Corvinus University of Budapest and Central European University. My research interest is the role of skills and institutions in the evolution of income inequality.
"Data helps us to understand and discover the world."
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I am a proud mother of two. My two kids gave me the energy during my studies. Besides family, spending time with friends, skiing, and discovering the world, different cultures and viewpoints inspire me.
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Publications
2020, March
Business Disruptions from Social Distancing
Koren, Miklós, and Rita PetÅ‘, 2020. “Business disruptions from social distancing.” PLoS ONE. 15(9), pp. e0239113.
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Social distancing interventions can be effective against epidemics but are potentially detrimental for the economy. Businesses that rely heavily on face-to-face communication or close physical proximity when producing a product or providing a service are particularly vulnerable. There is, however, no systematic evidence about the role of human interactions across different lines of business and about which will be the most limited by social distancing. Here we provide theory-based measures of the reliance of U.S. businesses on human interaction, detailed by industry and geographic location. We find that, before the pandemic hit, 43 million workers worked in occupations that rely heavily on face-to-face communication or require close physical proximity to other workers. Many of these workers lost their jobs since. Consistently with our model, employment losses have been largest in sectors that rely heavily on customer contact and where these contacts dropped the most: retail, hotels and restaurants, arts and entertainment and schools. Our results can help quantify the economic costs of social distancing.
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Working Papers
2020, April
Gender Differences in the Skill Content of Jobs. Under revision for Journal of Population Economics
With Balázs Reizer (KRTK)
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There is significant heterogeneity in actual skill use within occupations, even though occupations are differentiated by the tasks workers should perform during work. Using the PIAAC survey, we show that women use their cognitive skills less than men even within the same occupation. The gap in skill intensity cannot be explained by differences in worker characteristics or in cognitive skills. Instead, we show that living in a partnership significantly increases the skill use of men compared to women. We argue that having a partner affects skill use through time allocation as the gender penalty of partnered women disappears once we control for working hours and hours spent on housework. Finally, we do not find evidence for workplace discrimination against women.
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Foreign Acquisition and the Return to Skills
I study the effect of foreign takeovers on the return to specific skills. Using administrative data on Hungarian workers and firms augmented with occupation level skill requirement measures, I find a positive and significant increase in the return to independent problem solving skills after a foreign acquisition, while the effect is smaller and less robust in the case of interpersonal skills, and I find no effect on the return to routine task intensity. These results are not driven by a subgroup of workers (such as managers) or by any special firm types (such as manufacturing firms), the pattern is general. I also show that the change in the valuation of independent problem solving skills can explain the increase in the white-collar wage premium. I argue that these findings are in line with the hypothesis that foreign investors decentralize the firm structure after the takeover.
“Deny Thy Father and Refuse Thy Name” -
Nation Building and the Salary Differential of Family Name Changers in Hungary
With Attila Gáspár (university of Padova)
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The paper studies how the state in pre-World War I Hungary used labor market discrimination based on family names to encourage assimilation, foster nation-building, and decrease cultural diversity. Using unique, historical administrative data sets from the late 19th and early 20th centuries we show that workers from minority backgrounds who changed foreign surnames to Hungarian-sounding ones earned more than those who did not change. We use pooled OLS and a name frequency-based instrumental variable and find a median salary premium of 5.8% for name changers. This result shows that family name, a fundamental part of one's identity (which links the individual to both a family and a cultural community) is endogenous to short-run economic incentives. Next, we build a model of self-selection into assimilation and use it together with a historical policy shock to quantify the impact of incentivized name changing on the cultural composition of early 20th century Hungary.
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Movement at the crossroads of Europe:
Social mobility in Hungary from the 18th to the 21st century
With Pawel Bukowski (LSE), Gregory Clark (UC-Davis), and Attila Gáspár (university of Padova)
Submitted to the Journal of Population Economics
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The paper looks at the long-run social mobility in Hungary from the late 18th century until today. We measure social mobility at the level of groups defined by specific surnames, using their relative representation among elite occupations (Clark et al. 2015). We construct unique data from historical registries spanning more than two centuries to estimate the rate of status transmission under different political regimes: feudal and constitutional monarchies (-1918), right-wing authoritarianism (1920-1945), communism (1947-1989), and liberal democracy (1989-). The results show that long-run social mobility is generally low, implying that advantaged groups can keep their status despite many political and social upheavals. Nevertheless, historical elites lost their advantage at the fastest rate in regimes that were liberal by the standard of their age - constitutional monarchy and liberal democracy. On the other hand, right-wing authoritarianism had an adverse effect on social mobility as it protected the status of elite groups. Surprisingly, there is limited evidence for accelerating social mobility under communism. Finally, the status of disadvantaged groups (e.g., the Romani minority) did not improve under any of the studied regimes. However, we find evidence of lowering entry barriers to the elite occupations for women over the last century.
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Awards & Fellowships
2020
Best Dissertation Award - Central European University
2015
The History Project Research Grant – Institute for New Economic Thinking
We study how changing family name to a Hungarian sounding one, a key step in the assimilation process for minorities, affected labor market outcomes in Hungary in the late 19th and early 20th century. By doing this, we intend to show that identity, which often provides the grounds for discrimination, is endogenous to economic incentives. We build a unique data set out of administrative yearbooks and archival data, and use a natural experiment (a policy campaign) and an instrumental variables strategy (the Scrabble score of the name) to identify the effect. Preliminary results show that name changing is associated with significantly higher wages and promotion probabilities.
2014, 2015
CERGE-EI Teaching Fellowship
2009
Student Scientific Conference at Corvinus University of Budapest
I was awarded 2nd prize at the Student Scientific Conference for the paper titled “Graphology of the European Union: Analysis of European Foreign Trade Using Graph Theoretical Methods”
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Education
2012-2019
Central European University, Hungary
PhD in Economics – Thesis title: Essays in Labor Economics
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Two of the three essays are investigating the question about the role of skills in the labor market, while the third chapter looks at the labor market consequences of identity changes. The first chapter shows how a foreign takeover affects the return to specific skills, I found that the return on independent problem solving skills increases, while the returns on other skills are unchanged. The second chapter (joint with Balázs Reizer) study the gender differences in skill content of jobs, it shows that having family significantly increases the gap of skill use between men and women, we argue that time allocation by the family members is the potential mechanism driving the results. The third chapter (joint with Attila Gáspár) uses historical data to study the labor market impact of changing a foreign sounding surname to a Hungarian sounding one.
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2010-2012
Central European University, Hungary
MA in Economics GPA of courses: 3.85
2004 - 2006
Intensive Training Program at CUB
Advanced level in Mathematics courses
Advanced level in Economics courses
2008, Spring
IESEG, Lille, France
Fellow of the Erasmus Exchange Program of the European Union
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Teaching
2014, Fall
Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (ELTE)
In the undergraduate program – International Economics
2014, Winter, Fall
Teaching assistant at Central European University (CEU)
Macroeconomic Theory I and II., The Economics of Trade Policy
2011, Spring
Teaching assistant at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest (ELTE)
In the undergraduate program – Business Economics
2009-2010
Teaching assistant at Corvinus University of Budapest (CUB)
In the undergraduate program – Macroeconomics