Samuel Škoda

Using a policy reform that mandated firms to provide pay information in job ads, I study how workers adapt their search behavior and firms their hiring decisions, including actual wages. At the time of the reform, only one fifth of job ads contained pay information, strongly varying across firms and occupations. Linking online job board data to administrative social security data, I find that wages of newly hired workers increased, by about 3%, particularly within complying firms that were induced by the reform to show pay information. Job ads posted by these firms received more clicks and applications from job-seekers but I do not find evidence that the wage increase was driven by a positive selection of employees: previous wages of newly hired workers at their prior job did not increase, and additionally, applicants had on average lower pay expectations and characteristics less fitting job ads requirements. Furthermore, I do not find evidence of closing the gender pay gap. Adapting a simple model of partial job search, I illustrate how to interpret these responses.

This paper studies bid rigging in auctions with bidder preselection. We develop a theoretical model to analyze the optimal behavior of a bid-rigging cartel and show how two-stage auction formats, in which the first stage is used to preselect bidders, may be exploited. Bidder preselection based on opening bids allows cartels to exclude rivals and thereby increase procurement costs. To test our predictions, we use administrative data from public procurement in Slovakia. By leveraging a unique auction format reform we show that after a preselection procedure was abandoned, the savings gap between potentially rigged and non-rigged auctions decreased by 48%. In contrast to the conventional motivation for two-stage auctions, our analysis suggests that two-stage auctions might facilitate bid rigging and increase procurement costs.

Elections define representative democracies, but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to electoral rooms. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic which biannually renews man- dates in 1/3 of Senate constituencies rotating according to the 1995 election law. We show that in the second and third weeks after the 2020 elections (held on October 9-10), new COVID-19 infections grow significantly faster in voting compared to non-voting constituencies. A temporarily-related peak in hospital admissions and essentially no changes in test positivity rates suggest that the acceleration is not merely due to increased testing. The acceleration is absent in population above 65, consistently with strategic risk-avoidance by older voters. Our results have implications for postal voting reforms or postponing of large-scale, in-person (electoral) events during viral outbreaks.

In this paper, we use data on mixed-gender dual-earner couples in Southern and Western Europe to investigate how the division of unpaid household labor within mixed-gender couples varies depending on the ratio of the partners’ market wages. From analysis of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, we first show that married or cohabiting women do twice as much household work as single women with the same income. Furthermore, women’s time spent in home production does not vary in relation to the couple’s relative wages in Southern Europe. We find a positive elasticity of substitution between male and female labor in home production with respect to their relative within-couple wages in Western Europe. Our identification is based on predicting each country’s wage distributions within gender-specific cells defined by age group and education using distributions in all the other countries. We present a positive evidence for presence of a “second-shift” that women face especially in Southern Europe, which may stem from regional gender norms.

We present a bibliometric comparison of publication performance in 226 scientific disciplines in the Web of Science (WoS) for six post-communist EU member states relative to six EU-15 countries of a comparable size. We compare not only overall country-level publication counts, but also high quality publication output where publication quality is inferred from the journal Article Influence Scores. As of 2010–2014, post-communist countries are still lagging far behind their EU counterparts, with the exception of a few scientific disciplines mainly in Slovenia. Moreover, research in post-communist countries tends to focus relatively more on quantity rather than quality. The relative publication performance of post-communist countries in the WoS is strongest in natural sciences and engineering. Future research is needed to reveal the underlying causes of these performance differences, which may include funding and productivity gaps, the historical legacy of the communist ideology, and Web of Science coverage differences.

This project studies selection of self-employed into a voluntary unemployment insurance scheme using administrative data from Slovakia. Contrary to conventional rationale for mandating unemployment insurance I find evidence of advantageous rather than adverse selection into the UI scheme. However, focusing on a reform that reset existing contracts and effectively shrank the pool of insured, I find evidence of adverse selection within the pool of initially insured. These findings are consistent with existence of a non-monotonic marginal cost curve.