It is well known that the size of the informal (black or grey) economy causes serious fiscal problems for Hungary. This study makes an attempt to quantify the budgetary and macroeconomic effects of different ways of widening the formal sector (whitening”) with the help of a model. It turns out...

The phenomenon of infrequent price changes has troubled economists for decades. Intuitively one feels that for most price-setters there exists a range of inaction, i.e. a substantial measure of the states of the world, within which they do not wish to modify prevailing prices. However, basic...

We study a family of models of tax evasion, where a flat-rate tax finances only the provision of public goods, neglecting audits and wage differences. We focus on the comparison of two modeling approaches. The first is based on optimizing agents, who are endowed with social preferences, their...

Savings behaviour seems to exhibit heterogeneity across nations, and within nations, too. Large changes in saving rates have been observed in the last decades that can be viewed as signs of the arbitrariness of saving. There is a long tradition in the savings literature that separates people...

Macroeconomic modelling is a recent development within the rapidly advancing field of agentbased modelling. Like older macromodels macro ABMs must also feature a well-designed consumption-savings block. As the microeconomic ABM literature on savings is non-existent researchers had to resort to...

We set up an agent-based macromodel focusing on consumption-saving without the assumption of utility maximization, but preserving certain "rational" aspects of human choice based on the idea of ecological rationality Todd et al. (2012). In this framework we address the classical problem of the...

A basic principle of economics is that people always prefer a larger set of opportunities. Money illusion can be considered as the phenomenon that people may not perceive correctly their budget constraints, and may act in ways that run counter to this preference. In this view money illusion is a...

In this paper we analyze statistics derived from the cross-wavelet transform of inflation differentials and exchange rate changes for a group of countries with Germany as the reference country. An important tool is the wavelet coherency measure from which we can judge the strength of the...

Men's labor income is on average higher than that of women practically everywhere. This gender pay gap can be decomposed into two components: on the one hand men usually work in better paid jobs (the sorting effect), and, on the other, even in the same occupation men get higher wages (the...

The Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition was developed in order to detect and characterize discriminatory treatment, and one of its most frequent use has been the study of wage discrimination. It recognizes that the mere difference between the average wages of two groups may not mean discrimination (in...