Márta Bisztray - research

The role of firms in the wage penalty for chronic health conditions (with Balázs Muraközy and Rita Pető), IE CERS WP - 2025/8

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More than one-third of people in the EU report having a chronic health condition (CHC), and their share in the workforce is expected to rise. Using unique linked employer-employee administrative data from Hungary—combining detailed healthcare utilization with wage records—we identify workers with CHCs and analyze their labor market outcomes with a focus on the role of firms. Men and women with CHCs are 7 and 14 percentage points less likely to be employed, respectively. Among the employed, we find wage penalties of 5.8% for men and 13.9% for women. Differences in firm-specific pay premiums account for 12% of the penalty for men and 23% for women. Event-study models with worker fixed effects show persistent wage losses following CHC onset—4% for men and 1.5% for women—of which 0.2–0.5 percentage points are due to moving to lower-paying firms, with the rest likely reflecting missed promotions and raises. We then look at the role of firm ownership, foreign ownership being a strong proxy for technology, and find that 20% of the penalty is accounted for by this firm characteristic, 60-70% of which results from worker sorting and the remaining from CHC workers benefiting less from the higher wage premium of foreign-owned firms. These numbers imply that the fall in wages between the ages 40 and 60 would be 10-20% lower had there been no CHC penalty, about 20% of which is attributable to the presence of foreignowned firms.

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Services exporters and importers in Hungary (with Beata Javorcik and Helena Schweiger), IE CERS WP - 2024/21

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This paper uses rich firm-level data from Hungary to present some stylized facts on services trade. We show that (i) services exporters are even more rare than goods exporters; (ii) services exports are highly concentrated; (iii) services exporters are more likely than goods exporters to be located in cities; (iv) services exports tend to be preceded by services imports; (v) manufacturing firms also export services with services exports following goods exports in terms of timing and destinations; and (vi) services exporters have comparable premia to goods exporters.

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Accident-Induced Absence from Work and Wage Ladders (with Anikó Bíró, João Galindo da Fonseca and Tímea Molnár), IE CERS WP - 2023/21 and IZA DP No. 16312, (latest version) accepted at Journal of Labor Economics

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To analyze how short absences from work affect workers’ labor trajectory, we use linked employer-employee administrative data from Hungary with rich administrative health records, and unexpected and mild accidents with no permanent labor productivity losses as exogenous drivers of short absences. Our Event Study results show that, relative to the counterfactual of no accident, short (1–5-months long) periods of absence after accidents decrease wages by 1 percent in the first two years after return to work, which are driven by missed internal promotions in small firms and missed opportunities to move to higher-paying firms for workers in large firms.

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Precautionary Fertility: Conceptions, Births, and Abortions around Employment Shocks (with Anna Bárdits, Anna Adamecz, Andrea Weber and Ágnes Szabó-Morvai ), IE CERS WP - 2023/03 and IZA DP No. 15990

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This paper studies the effects of employment shocks on births and induced abortions. We are the first to show that abortions play a role in fertility responses to job displacement. Furthermore, we document precautionary fertility behavior: the anticipatory response of women to expected labor market shocks. Using individual-level administrative data from Hungary, we look at firm closures and mass layoffs as conditionally exogenous employment shocks in an event study design. After establishing that both shocks have a similarly large and persistent negative effect on employment and wages, we show that women already react to the anticipation of these shocks, and their fertility responses differ substantially for firm closures and mass layoffs. We find that abortions increase by 88% in the year before firm closures, while the number of births is not affected. Mass layoffs have no significant effect on abortions in the preceding year but increase the number of births by 44%. Mass layoffs and firm closures differ in one crucial aspect: pregnant women cannot be laid off until the firm exists, but no such dismissal protection is available in the case of firm closures. Thus, when dismissal protection
is available, anticipated employment shocks increase the number of live births, whereas when it is not, they increase the number of abortions. These results suggest that dismissal protection has the potential to support women to keep pregnancies at times of economic shocks.

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Knowledge flows and global value chains (with Niclas Poitiers), Bruegel Working Paper No. 04/2022

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We explore the implications of a range of novel approaches to GVCs for our understanding of how they affect knowledge flow and innovation. This Working Paper is an output from the MICROPROD project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 822390.

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Dissecting Global Value Chains: Evidence from the global automotive industry, IE CERS WP - 2021/42

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The potential restructuring of global value chains (GVCs) is a widely discussed question in current debates. At the same time, a proper way of capturing these value chains is challenging. This paper focuses on the automotive industry, using detailed data on firm-to-firm transactions in Hungary, as well as on cross-border sales and purchases. Its aim is twofold, capturing to what extent firms being connected to a GVC differ from other firms in the same industry, and what is the impact of integration into GVCs. Findings suggest that firms being part of GVCs tend to be larger, more productive, foreign-owned and having a higher level of intangible capital. There is some suggestive evidence that entering the GVC has a positive impact on size, productivity and per capita wage for certain firm groups and it is preceeded by increased imports of capital. Finally, there are also differences by employee composition.

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Do friends follow each other? : FDI network effects in Central Europe (with Gábor Békés), IE CERS-HAS MT-DP  - 2017/19

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A great deal of multinationals receive a bundle of hidden or cash subsidizes upon investing in a foreign country. Policymakers often argue that a subsidy today will help locate friends of the investor later on. Using extensive data on FDI investments, we analyze such patterns. In particular, we investigate if co-location is more frequent among connected firms such as members of business groups as well as firms sharing similar background. Focusing on investments into Central and Eastern European countries we find evidence of co-location pattern of connected firms.

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The effect of foreign-owned large plant closures on nearby firms, IE CERS-HAS MT-DP - 2016/23

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I estimate the impact of foreign-owned large plant closures on local firms. I identify 41 such events in Hungary and assign comparable control cities with foreign-owned large plants operating in the same industry and not closing. I use a firm-level panel database of Hungarian firms between 1992 and 2012. I do a difference-in-differences estimation comparing outcomes of firms in the treated and control areas, before and after the plant closure. I find that after the foreign-owned large plant closures sales of nearby firms decreased by 6 percentage points and employment decreased by 3 percentage points on average. Firms operating in local services were hurt even more, suggesting that reduced local purchasing power due to the layoffs is a significant channel of the local plant closure effect. Firms operating in the supplier industry of the closing plant also decreased employment more than average, suggesting that input-output linkages play an important role in the propagation of negative shocks. In contrast, firms in the industry of the closing plant increased their employment, suggesting that they could benefit from the increased local labor supply. I also find that low-productivity firms were hurt more by the plant closures than high-productivity firms.

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The effect of FDI on local suppliers: Evidence from Audi in Hungary, IE CERS-HAS MT-DP - 2016/22

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In 1993 Audi opened a new plant in Hungary. This paper examines the long-term effects of this large foreign direct investment on local firms operating in supplier industries. I use firmlevel panel data with long time series. Using the method of triple difference-in-differences I compare outcomes of firms in supplier and control industries, close and far from the Audi plant, before and after the entry. My main findings are: (1) after the Audi entry the average annual growth rate of local firms increased by 3 percentage points for sales and 2 percentage points for employment. The effect is visible only five years after the entry of Audi. I find no positive effect on productivity. (2) Firms with foreign owners account for all the positive effect on sales and employment, suggesting a foreign-to-foreign complementarity in investments. Firms with higher productivity gained more. Consequently, the low initial productivity of domestic firms may explain the lack of an effect in this group. (3) New entrants in the supplier industry locating close to Audi are larger and grow faster, suggesting that Audi also had an effect on the extensive margin.

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