The pros and cons of differentiating the minimum wage in Hungary

148 Cseres-Gergely et al. (2012) conclude that short run benefits exceed the cost if deadweight loss – that is the share of those who would have found a job without the subsidy – is below 20% of subsidised jobs. As a crude measure of the latter, the number of subsidised job entries as recorded by the Tax Authority is compared to the number of entries by potentially eligible job seekers as observed in the dataset. Results suggest that there may be some deadweight in the programme but that it is not very large.