CEP | People | Pawel Bukowski

Biography

Dr Pawel Bukowski is an Assistant Professor of Economics at University College London, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He is a Visiting Fellow at Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics (LSE) and a Faculty Associate at the International Inequalities Institute (LSE). He is also an adjunct at the Institute of Economics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He was a senior expert at the European Expert Network on Economics of Education of the European Commission. He has founded Dobrobyt na Pokolenia (Prosperity for Generations) - a Polish think-tak - and he is a member of Concilium Civitas - a group gathering leading polish social scientist.

Current areas of research include:

Labour Economics: the role of firms in wage determination; worker power and unions; wage inequality trends; gender discrimination.
Inequalities: understanding the evolution of national and sub-national economic inequalities, with special focus on Central and Eastern Europe; intergenerational social mobility; inequalities and conflict.
Spatial economics: cross-country comparable measures of income inequality; determinants of spatial inequality; geographic trends in returns to education.

Publications

CEP discussion papers

Spatial wage inequality in North America and Western Europe: changes between and within local labour markets 1975-2019

The rise of economic inequalities in advanced economies has been often linked with the growth of spatial inequalities within countries, yet there is limited comparative research that studies the relationship between nati... Read more...

Luis Bauluz, Sebastien Breau, Pawel Bukowski, Mark Fransham, Annie Seong Lee, Neil Lee, Margarita Lopez Forero, Clement Malgouyres, Filip Novokmet, Moritz Schularick and Gregory Verdugo

16 August 2023

External publications

Power plays

The cost of living crisis and the return of strikes over pay and conditions have brought the issue of worker power to the fore in 2022. Although some have pointed to a tight labour market as enabling workers to demand hi... Read more...

Ufuk Altunbuken, Pawel Bukowski, Stephen Machin and Hannah Slaughter

07 July 2022

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

Poland's economy in the pandemic

The Polish economy has largely managed to avoid the pandemic-induced troubles experienced in Western Europe. But as Pawel Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos argue, contrary to government claims of able stewardship, what has got ... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski and Wojciech Paczos

15 October 2021

Journal article - forthcoming

Social Mobility and Political Regimes: Intergenerational Mobility in Hungary, 1949-2017

This paper measures social mobility rates in Hungary during the period 1949 to 2017, using surnames to measure social status. In those years, there were two very different social regimes. The first was the Hungarian Peop... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski, Gregory Clark, Attila Gaspar and Rita Peto

08 October 2021

Journal article

Between communism and capitalism: long-term inequality in Poland, 1892–2015

We construct the first consistent series on the long-term distribution of income in Poland by combining tax, household survey and national accounts data. We document a U-shaped evolution of inequalities from the end of t... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski and Filip Novokmet

01 June 2021

Blog

Why is Poland's economy emerging so strongly from the pandemic? A comparison with the UK

Poland is no longer Europe's "green island" of growth, as it was during the 2008 financial crisis when it was the only country not to fall into recession. Yet its economy has managed to avoid the pandemic-induced trouble... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski and Wojciech Paczos

27 April 2021

Journal article

Student Mobility and Sorting of Students Mobilnosc studentów i ich sortowanie

This study investigates whether improving student mobility leads to greater sorting of students between schools and classes. I isolate an exogenous change in student mobility using the two-stage design of the Polish comp... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski

30 September 2020

Blog

We need more progressive taxation, and a wealth tax, to pay for the Covid-19 rescue packages

The cost of COVID-19 rescue packages will likely be partly financed by increased inflation, which will disproportionally affect less-affluent people and workers, including frontline NHS staff. Pawel Bukowski (LSE) and Wo... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski and Wojciech Paczos

07 July 2020

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

Between communism and capitalism: long-run inequality in Poland

How has inequality in Poland evolved between communism and capitalism to reach one of the highest levels in Europe today? Pawel Bukowski and Filip Novokmet chart a century of data on Polish inequality, 1892-2015, to exam... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski and Filip Novokmet

01 November 2019

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance

Workers' falling share of firms' profits

To what extent do UK companies share their profits with employees? Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin find that rent-sharing is on a much smaller scale today than during the 1980s and 1990s – and that the decl... Read more...

Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin

01 July 2019

CEP discussion papers

Between communism and capitalism: long-term inequality in Poland, 1892-2015

How has Polish inequality evolved between communism and capitalism to reach one of the highest levels in Europe today? To address this question, we construct the first series on the long-term distribution of income in Po... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski and Filip Novokmet

14 June 2019

Journal article

How history matters for student performance. lessons from the Partitions of Poland

This paper examines the effect on current student performance of the 19th century Partitions of Poland among Austria, Prussia and Russia. Using a regression discontinuity design, I show that student test scores are 0.6 s... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski

01 March 2019

Journal article

The threat of competition and public school performance: Evidence from Poland

Theoretical literature on whether school competition raises public school productivity is ambiguous (e.g. MacLeod & Urquiola, 2015) and empirical evidence is mixed (e.g. Hsieh and Urquiola, 2006). Moreover, competition m... Read more...

Pawel Bukowski and Martyna Kobus

01 December 2018

CEP discussion papers

Rent sharing and inclusive growth

The long-run evolution of rent sharing is empirically studied. Based upon a comprehensive and harmonized panel of the top 300 publicly quoted British companies over thirty five years, the paper reports evidence of a sign... Read more...

Brian Bell, Pawel Bukowski and Stephen Machin

27 November 2018