"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be."
Lord Kelvin

In the footsteps of a kleptocratic state. A presentation at the Budapest Science Meetup

Presentations, Publications, , ,

9 November 2017

Budapest Science Meetup, Library of the Hungarian Academy of Science, 7pm

In the presentation we dealt with the effect of friendship and family ties with the Hungarian Prime Minister (Viktor Orban) on the intensity of competition of public tenders won by companies owned by his close friends and family members. The analysis is based on more than 151,000 Hungarian public procurement tenders in the period of 2009-2016. Using OLS and ordered logit estimation and propensity score matching method, we estimate the effect of the friendship and family ties on the intensity of competition of tenders. The results point out that the family and friendship ties have significant negative effects on the intensity of competition, if we control the effect of sectors, time, EU funding, procedure type and size of tenders. Thus, for the owners of the Hungarian companies, the friendship with Orban or being a member of his family pays off.

The presentation (in Hungarian, pdf)