We use firm-level data from Hungary to estimate knowledge spillovers in importing through fine spatial and managerial networks. By identifying from variation in peers' import experience across source countries, by comparing the spillover from neighboring buildings with a cross-street placebo, and by exploiting plausibly exogenous firm moves, we obtain credible estimates and establish three results. (1) There are significant knowledge spillovers in both spatial and managerial networks. Having a peer which has imported from a particular country more than doubles the probability of starting to import from that country, but the effect quickly decays with distance. (2) Spillovers are heterogeneous: they are stronger when firms or peers are larger or more productive, and exhibit complementarities in firm and peer productivity. (3) The model-implied social multiplier is highly skewed, implying that targeting an import-encouragement policy to firms with many and productive neighbors can make it 26% more effective. These results highlight the benefit of firm clusters in facilitating the diffusion of business practices.

We use data from Hungary to establish two results about the relationship between the government and the media. (i) We document large advertising favors from the government to connected media, and large corruption coverage favors from connected media to the government. Our empirical strategy exploits sharp reallocations around changes in media ownership and other events to rule out market‐based explanations. (ii) Under the assumptions of a structural model, we distinguish between owner ideology and favor exchange as the mechanism driving favors. We estimate our model exploiting within‐owner changes in coverage for identification and find that both mechanisms are important. These results imply that targeted government advertising can meaningfully influence content. Counterfactuals show that targeted advertising can also influence owner ideology, by making media ownership more profitable to pro‐government connected investors. Our results are consistent with qualitative evidence from many democracies and suggest that government advertising affects media content worldwide.

Since 2015 the populist government of the Law and Justice Party in Poland has spearheaded a highly effective campaign against the country’s lawyers, encountering relatively muted social opposition. Using Bourdieuan lenses, the article traces the roots of that remarkable institutional weakness of the Polish legal profession to the highly formalist approach to law and legal thinking that Poland’s lawyers espoused. Prior to the fall of communism, and in democratic Poland, the role of lawyers in society was to act as guardians of “neatness” of the legal system – or that system’s internal clarity, cohesion, and completeness. Such a sterile approach to legal practice was initially attractive, among other reasons, because it protected the legal profession from difficult legitimacy challenges stemming from that profession’s pre-1989 coexistence with the communist regime. With time, however, the refuge that formalism offered became a trap that undermined lawyers’ political and economic power.

Concern for the environment is widespread and consumers generally hold favorable values toward green consumption; however, they often struggle to translate these values into actual green consumption behaviors. This so-called “green gap” has attracted much research interest in recent years, yet questions remain regarding the factors that may influence it and what form this influence takes. Taking the cognitive view in studying green consumption, we seek to shed light on the green gap by empirically testing the roles of risk aversion and subjective knowledge as potential moderators of the green value-action disparity. Proposing a moderated moderation model, we additionally explore the categorical interaction effect of gender differences with risk aversion and subjective knowledge in predicting green purchase behaviors. Using structured survey data (N = 328), we demonstrate that consumers lower in general risk aversion and higher in green subjective knowledge have greater consistency between their values and behaviors in the green consumption context. Further, we reveal a conditional interaction effect of gender in which women were less risk-averse and more knowledgeable than men, resulting in greater green value-behavior consistency. Our study contributes to the growing body of research on sustainable consumption by offering psychographic explanations for the inconsistency between what consumers say and do when it comes to green purchasing. Implications of this study encourage consumer researchers, global managers, and public policy makers, when developing green marketing programs or when seeking to strengthen the green value-action relationship in general, to consider how risk aversion and subjective knowledge may interact with gender differences.

Using detailed U.S. and Spanish export data, we document that trade costs of a per-shipment nature are associated with less frequent and larger shipments (i.e., more lumpiness) in international trade. This finding is pervasive across broad product categories, but most apparent for industrial supplies, parts and accessories, and food products.

The paper introduces for the most frequently used three-dimensional fixed effects panel data models the appropriate Within estimators. It analyzes the behaviour of these estimators in the case of no-self-flow data, unbalanced data and dynamic autoregressive models.

The enlargement of the European Union on May 1, 2004 has presented many opportunities and challenges for SMEs in the newly admitted countries. This paper examines the history of five Hungarian companies, and what the enlargement has meant for them. They are Wizz Air, Artis Restaurant, Lidl/CBA, Kaposplast and Subway Sandwich. The impact of heightened competition, increased market opportunities and environmental differences are examined.