CERGE-EI Alumni Blog

We are extremely saddened to report the sudden death of Slava Vinogradov on Sunday, March 28th, 2010, after several weeks of hospitalization. Slava joined CERGE-EI in 1997 which means that his time here spanned 13 cohorts of CERGE-EI students.

His recent research culminated in a paper with Eugen Kováč and Krešimir Žigić (both CERGE-EI alumni), titled “Technological leadership and persistence of monopoly under endogenous entry: Static versus dynamic analysis” which is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.

Slava was a wonderful colleague, an enthusiastic teacher and a good friend – he will be missed by many. Our deepest sympathies go to his family – his wife, two children, one just half a year old, and his mother.

CERGE-EI always strives to provide stipends that provide students the opportunity to concentrate fully on their dissertation research without the need to earn supplementary income elsewhere.

We’ve made two important steps forward on this front:

Firstly, CERGE-EI succeeded in obtaining support from the Ministry of Education’s Basic Research Centers program which funds joint efforts of the universities and the Academy of Sciences to train young researchers. Thanks to this project, essentially all 3rd to 5th year students are employed as junior researchers.

Secondly, we obtained a major grant from the European Structural Funds that were provided to the city of Prague. The grant funds performance stipends, salaries of junior researchers, student mobility trips, and publication bonuses for students.

The combination of these two funding sources allowed us to reorganize the financial support scheme for students in their 3rd to 5th years of study. Actual increases are tied to the students’ research performance. Several top students receive stipends of CZK 18,600 a month after-tax, a level clearly competitive with most universities in Western Europe on a PPP basis.

This is our first post, and we thought it best to start off with some details about comings and goings amongst the CERGE-EI faculty/researcher community.

Fabio Michelucci joins the CERGE-EI faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Fall ‘09 semester. Fabio earned his Ph.D. in economics at University College London in 2007, and then spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology. His research focus is on auction theory.

At the same time, Michal Pakoš has joined CERGE-EI as a Senior Researcher, specializing in asset pricing models. Michal received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and later worked as an Assistant Professor at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

We mentioned comings and goings, and unfortunately it’s now time to talk about colleagues who are leaving CERGE-EI, namely Junghun Cho and Andreas Ortmann. Andreas has been with CERGE-EI since 2000 and will move to Sydney, Australia, where he has been appointed professor for experimental and behavioral economics at the Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales. Junghun has been a devoted micro theory and teacher for the past three years but is heading for a new life in a private sector position in Seoul. We wish both of them the best in their future endeavors!