Seminar by Attila Gáspár

SEMINAR ROOM - 1st FLOOR, PALAZZO LEVI CASES, VIA DEL SANTO 33 - h 01.00pm

03.12.2019

Seminar by Attila Gáspár, University of Padova

Title: "Deny Thy Father and Refuse Thy Name - Nation Building and the Salary Differential of Family Name Changers in Hungary"

Abstract: The paper studies how the state in pre-World War I Hungary used labor market discrimination based on family names to encourage assimilation, foster nation building and decrease cultural diversity. Using unique, historical administrative data sets from the late 19th and early 20th centuries we show that workers from minority backgrounds who changed foreign surnames to Hungarian sounding ones earned more than those who did not change. We use pooled OLS and a name frequency based instrumental variable and find a median salary premium of 5.8% for name changers. This result shows that family name, a fundamental part of one's identity (which links the individual to both a family and a cultural community) is endogenous to short-run economic incentives. Next, we build a model of self-selection into assimilation, and use it together with a historical policy shock to quantify the impact of incentivized name changing on the cultural composition of early 20th century Hungary.