Publications of Álmos Telegdy

Telegdy Á. Corporate Governance and the Structure of Ownership of Hungarian Corporations. In: Mallin CA, editor. Handbook on International Corporate Governance. 2nd ed. Cheltenlham: Edward Elgar; 2011. p. 192-221.

Munkahelyteremtés energiahatékonysággal? Egy széleskörű, komplex, mély épületfelújítási program foglalkoztatásra gyakorolt hatásai Magyarországon

Magyarországon, a hasonló gazdasági problémákkal küzdő és kevésbé gazdag országokhoz hasonlóan, az éghajlatváltozás elleni küzdelem, súlya ellenére sem kerülhet bele a legmagasabb prioritású politikai célkitűzések közé. Viszont az ügy fontossága, valamint Magyarország politikai környezete miatt, vagyis a klímavédelemben a világon élenjáró Európai Unió részeként, nekünk is ki kell vennünk a probléma ellen való küzdelemben a részünket. Ilyen körülmények között rendkívül fontos megtalálni azokat a klímavédelmi intézkedéseket, amelyek egyszerre több gazdasági, társadalmi, politikai cél elérését mozdítják elő, a klímavédelmi hatásokon kívül. Erre a célra talán a legalkalmasabb terület az energiahatékonyság növelése, hiszen ezek járulékos hasznai sokszor sokkal nagyobbak, mint magából a klímavédelemből származók.

Political Selection of Firms into Privatization Programs. Evidence from Romanian Comprehensive Data

Exploiting a unique institutional feature of early Romanian privatization, when a group of firms was explicitly barred from privatization, while another was partially privatized by management employee buyouts, we test how politicians select firms into privatization programs. Using comprehensive firm data, we estimate the relation between pre-privatization firm characteristics – the information known to politicians at the time of decision making – and the effect of privatization on employment, efficiency and wages. With the estimated coefficients we simulate the effect of privatization on non-privatizable and privatizable firms. We find that politicians expected privatization to increase employment in the privatizable group by 7-10 percent, while to decrease it in the non-privatizable group by 10-30 percent, depending on the first-stage estimation method, OLS with or without matching. We do not find such discrepancies in the expected change in firm efficiency; the simulated efficiency effect of privatization is large and positive for both groups of firms, and it is 52-65 percent for non-privatizable, and 41-43 percent for privatizable firms. The analysis does not support the hypothesis that wages played an important role in privatization decisions. Our study suggests that employment concerns played the key role in selecting firms for privatization, even if efficiency gains had to be sacrificed.

Employment and Wage Effects of Privatization: Evidence from Hungary, Romania, Russia and Ukraine

We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatisation on employment and wages. The results consistently reject job losses and never imply large wage cuts from either domestic or foreign privatisation. The domestic privatisation estimates are close to zero for employment; for wages, they are negative but small in magnitude. Estimated foreign privatisation effects are nearly always positive and sometimes large for both outcome variables. We interpret the employment and wage results in terms of underlying scale, productivity, and cost effects of privatisation.

Earle J, Telegdy Á. Ownership and Wages: New Evidence from Linked Employer-Employee Data in Hungary, 1986-2003. In: Analysis of Firms and Employees - Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. NBER; 2008.

The Productivity Effects of Privatization: Longitudinal Estimates from Hungary, Romania, Russia and Ukraine

This paper estimates the effect of privatization on multifactor productivity (MFP) using comprehensive panel data on initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four economies. We exploit the data’s longitudinal dimension to control for pre-privatization selection and estimate long-run impacts. The estimates are robust to functional form, but sensitive to selection controls. Our preferred random growth estimates imply positive MFP effects of 15% in Romania, 8% in Hungary, and 2% in Ukraine, but a negative 3% effect in Russia. The foreign privatization effect is larger (18–35%) in all countries. Positive domestic effects appear immediately in Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine and continue growing thereafter, but only emerge 5 years after privatization in Russia.