The aim of this paper is to find determinants of the choice of the field of study made by individuals undertaking higher education in Poland. One the most striking elements of the Polish transition process is a fundamental change of the conditions of the tertiary education market. With growing popularity of higher studies, choices related to this aspect of educational paths of young people gain more and more importance. In this empirical study we apply conditional multinomial logit model in order to find predictors of choices of different study profiles. Unobservable characterises for alternatives, regarding wages and probabilities of employment, were estimated using standard linear regression with Heckman selection procedure. The data used in the analysis come from the Polish General Social Survey for the period 1997-2010. General conclusion from our analysis is that economic factors are insignificant predictors of choice of the type and profile of higher education institution. Instead, social aspects, particularly related to the family background, seem to be key factors driving decisions of those individuals who decided to continue their education beyond secondary level.

The public sector is commonly thought to offer relatively low wages, but neither statistics nor research for different countries justifies this belief. In general, the observed regularity is that the average wage in the public sector exceeds the average wage in the private one. The difference is sometimes quite substantial. The comparison of raw average wages suggesting higher wages for public sector would however be misleading. To a large extent, this premium can be attributed to the differences in the structure of employment in both sectors. The public sector employment is biased towards higher level of education and longer job tenures, which on the grounds of human capital theory explains the observed higher average wages in the public sector. The aim of this article is to find to what extent the observed difference in wages is a result of differentiated structure of employment. We use LFS data for Poland and a Mincerean wage regression with Heckman correction supplemented by a quantile regression to show that, after controlling for structural differences in employment, the public sector wage premium in Poland is negative.

In this paper we discuss and investigate mutual relationship between FDI and FPI stocks in 3 countries. The standard theoretical economic paradigm sharply differentiates between the two, treating them rather as substitutes from foreign investor’s perspective. Yet, some recent empirical attempts reveal that there are important similarities in their determinants and thus suggest their complementarity. Furthermore, we contribute by assessing FDI & FPI stocks’ impact on real GDPs. In this paper we present estimates of vector error correction (VEC) models’ parameters for three countries, in various settings. We find a number of interesting points – in case of Poland there seem to exist some significant long-run dependences between real GDP and stocks of FDI and FPI, which to some extent stands in opposition to inferences derived from analogical models constructed for two well-developed countries, the United Kingdom and Germany.