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.