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Dejan Kovač, Ph.D.

Dejan Kovač, Ph.D.
Current Position

since 9/21

Economist in the Department of Structural Change and Productivity

Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) – Member of the Leibniz Association

Research Interests
  • international economics
  • behavioural economics
  • political economy

Dejan Kovač joined the Department of Structural Change and Productivity in September 2021. His research focuses on international economics, behavioural economics, and political economy.

Dejan Kovač received his bachelor's degree from University of Zagreb, his master's degree and his PhD from Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education – Economics Institute in Prag. Prior to joining IWH, he was a researcher at Princeton University.

Your contact

Dejan Kovač, Ph.D.
Dejan Kovač, Ph.D.
Mitglied - Department Structural Change and Productivity
Send Message +49 345 7753-862

Publications

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Exposure to Conflict, Migrations and Long-run Education and Income Inequality: Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Adnan Efendic Dejan Kovač Jacob N. Shapiro

in: Defence and Peace Economics, forthcoming

Abstract

We investigate the long-term relationship between conflict-related migration and individual socioeconomic inequality. Looking at the post-conflict environment of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a former Yugoslav state most heavily impacted by the wars of the early 1990s, the paper focuses on differences in educational performance and income between four groups: migrants, internally displaced persons, former external migrants, and those who did not move. The analysis leverages a municipality-representative survey (n ≈ 6,000) that captured self-reported education and income outcomes as well as migration histories. We find that individuals with greater exposure to conflict had systematically worse educational performance and lower earnings two decades after the war. Former external migrants now living in BiH have better educational and economic outcomes than those who did not migrate, but these advantages are smaller for external migrants who were forced to move. We recommend that policies intended to address migration-related discrepancies should be targeted on the basis of individual and family experiences caused by conflict.

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The Impact of Delay: Evidence from Formal out-of-Court Restructuring

Stjepan Srhoj Dejan Kovač Jacob N. Shapiro Randall K. Filer

in: Journal of Corporate Finance, February 2023

Abstract

Different types of bankruptcy restructuring procedures are used in most legal systems to decide the fate of businesses facing financial hardship. We study how bargaining failures in an under-researched type of restructuring procedure, a formal out-of-the court procedure impacts the economic performance of participating firms. Croatia introduced a “pre-bankruptcy settlement” (PBS) process in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007–2009. A novel dataset provides us with annual financial statements for both sides of more than 180,000 debtor–creditor pairs, enabling us to address selection into failed negotiations by matching a rich set of creditor and debtor characteristics. Failures to settle at the PBS stage due to idiosyncratic bargaining problems, which effectively delay entry into the standard bankruptcy procedure, lead to a lower rate of survival among debtors as well as reduced employment, revenue, and profits. We are the first study to track how bargaining failures diffuse through the network of creditors, finding a significant negative effect on small creditors, but not others. Our results highlight the impact of delay and the importance of structuring bankruptcy procedures, to rapidly resolve uncertainty about firms’ future prospects.

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O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice in Four Countries

Adam Altmejd Andrés Barrios-Fernández Marin Drlje Joshua Goodman Michael Hurwitz Dejan Kovač Christine Mulhern Christopher Neilson Jonathan Smith

in: Quarterly Journal of Economics, No. 3, 2021

Abstract

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions, but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small, or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups, and this suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.

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Working Papers

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Oxytocin, Empathy, Altruism and Charitable Giving: Experimental Evidence from Blood Donations

Irena Jukić Dejan Kovač Danijela Vuletić Čugalj

in: IWH Discussion Papers, No. 4, 2023

Abstract

We conducted a field experiment in the natural setting of blood donations to test how oxytocin relates to empathy and altruism. We randomly assigned blood donors in the Croatian Institute for Transfusion Medicine to three groups with the aim to induce different levels of empathy by showing a neutral video to the donors from the control group and an emotional to the donors from the first and second treatment groups. In addition to watching the emotional video, donors from the second treatment group are given a gift which relates to the emotional story from the video. We find no effect of our treatment on induced levels of oxytocin. Null effects of our treatments could be explained by the above average baseline levels of oxytocin and inability of our treatments to provoke emotional stimuli in blood donors. Nonetheless, for our empathy measures we find the effect of gift exchange on empathic concerns, but not on perspective taking. After our experimental treatments, we followed the return of our blood donors for a whole year. We find that only variable which consistently predicts return for blood donation in stated period is the number of previous donations. From policy perspective it is an important finding. Especially for hospitals and other blood providers when faced with time and resource constraints.

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Keywords

Behaviour
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