Wojciech Hardy

Do pirates play fair? Testing copyright awareness of sports viewers

ABSTRACT Ethical norms are believed to be followed more loosely on the Internet than in the ‘real world’. This proposition is often evoked to explain the prevalence of so-called digital piracy. In this study, we provide evidence from a vignette experiment that contradicts this claim. Analysing the case of sports broadcast, we compare explicitly the ethical judgement of legal and illegal sharing in the offline and online contexts. We find that the norms concerning legality, availability of alternatives and deriving material benefits from sharing content do not differ substantially between the virtual and real worlds. We also test explicitly for the role of legal awareness and find that emphasising what is prohibited (copyright infringement) is less effective than focusing on what is permitted (fair use) in reducing the disparity between legal and ethical norms.

Educational upgrading, structural change and the task composition of jobs in Europe

We analyze the changes in the task content of jobs in 24 European countries between 1998 and 2015. We link the O*NET occupational data with the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU†LFS), and use the methodology of Acemoglu and Autor (). We find that the intensity of non†routine cognitive tasks grew in all countries, while the intensity of manual tasks declined. Workforce upskilling was the major factor contributing to these developments. The intensity of routine cognitive tasks grew in most Central and Eastern European countries, but it declined in Western European countries. This difference is attributed to the contrasting patterns of structural changes in these groups of countries.

Job retention among older workers in central and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT We study job retention rates – the shares of workers who continue to work in the same job over the next five years – in Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Job retention among older workers is key to prolonging careers and increasing employment of older people which in turn is a crucial challenge for these countries. We find that the retention rates among workers aged 55–59 are low and amount to about a half of the retention rates among prime aged workers. Only in Poland the retention rates of older workers have increased for both men and women between 1998 and 2013. The individuals least likely to retain jobs after the age of 60 were women, those with lower education, working in industry, in medium or low-skilled occupations, and those living with a non-working partner. The policies aimed at encouraging job retention in Central and Eastern Europe should focus on these groups of workers.

File sharing as conditional cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment

ABSTRACT In this project, we investigate downloading and sharing behaviour in a novel ‘piracy game’ modelled after standard public good games. We find that willingness to share correlates positively with the sharing by others. By contrast, actual behaviour in the ‘piracy game’ is not correlated with self-reported behaviour.

Technology or Upskilling? Trends in the Task Composition of Jobs in Central and Eastern Europe

In this paper we analyse the changes in the task content of jobs in Central and Eastern European countries between 1998 and 2013. We link the O*NET data on occupational characteristics with EU-LFS, following the approach of Autor, Levy and Murnane (2003), and Acemoglu and Autor (2011). We find that the CEE countries witnessed similar trends of rising intensity of non-routine cognitive tasks, and a decreasing intensity of manual tasks, although they differed with regards to changes in the routine cognitive task content. We assess the relative role played by education and technology in the development of task contents. We also decompose the observed changes into the contributions of sectoral, educational and occupational changes as well as the interaction between them. Our results show that workforce upskilling was the major factor behind the evolution of non-routine cognitive and manual tasks in CEE, whereas structural changes and shifts towards work with lower speed of de-routinisation have shaped routine cognitive tasks.