PhD Alumni Profiles
- Academics in North America, Western Europe, Asia & Pacific
- Academics in Central Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States
- International Organizations
- Government / Public Sector
- Business / Corporate
Academics in North America, Western Europe, Asia & Pacific
Jan Bena (PhD 2006)
Jan Bena is currently Assistant Professor of Finance at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada. He defended his thesis, titled "Essays on Corporate Finance" in 2006. Three years later, in June 2009, he received a second Ph.D., this one in Finance, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He considers his primary research interests to be: Interaction between financial and real economic systems, finance and innovation, finance and product market competition and access to external finance and financial constraints.
His most recent publication is a co-authored paper with Štěpán Jurajda titled "Financial Development and Growth in the EU Single Market," in Economica, July 2011. Before that, he and co-author Jan Hanousek published "Rent Extraction by Large Shareholders: Evidence Using Dividend Policy in the Czech Republic," in the Czech Journal of Economics and Finance, 58, 2008. He has a number of current working papers with Evangelia Vourvachaki, Peter Ondko (both from CERGE-EI) and with Lorenzo Garlappi, Kai Li and Hernan Ortiz-Molina.
Pavlo Blavatskyy (PhD 2005)
Pavlo Blavatskyy is currently Full Professor of Experimental Economics at Institute of Public Finance at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Before joining CERGE-EI in 2000, he completed an MPhil degree in Economics at the University of Cambridge. Six months before defending his dissertation, titled "Essays on Cumulative Prospect Theory, Individuals' Preference for the Most Probable Winner, and the Design of Olympic Prizes", Pavlo accepted an Assistant Professorship & Post-Doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. In 2009 he moved to Innsbruck to assume his current position.
A few of his most recent publications include "Probabilistic Choice and Stochastic Dominance" in Economic Theory, "Probabilistic Risk Aversion with an Arbitrary Outcome Set" in Economics Letters, and "Contest Success Function with the Possibility of a Draw: Axiomatization" in the Journal of Mathematical Economics. He is also Coordinating Editor with Theory and Decision and an Advisory Editor for the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. Handelsblatt.com has selected him as 11th in their ranking of economists under the age of 40 in the German-speaking region (Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland).
Alexander Klein (PhD 2006)
Alexander Klein is a Lecturer at the University of Kent's School of Economics in Canterbury, UK. He joined CERGE-EI's 1999 entry cohort and defended his thesis in 2006, titled "Internal Migration in Bohemia at the Turn of the 20th Century". After completing his dissertation, he began the first of two post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Warwick in the UK. In 2010, he accepted his current position at the University of Kent.
His recent publications include "When and why did eastern European economies begin to fail? Lessons from a Czechoslovak/UK productivity comparison, 1921–1991" in Explorations in Economic History and "Did Children's Education Matter? Family Migration as a Mechanism of Human Capital Investment. Evidence from Nineteenth Century Bohemia" in The Economic History Review.
Dmitry Ryvkin (PhD 2006)
Dmitry Ryvkin is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He entered the PhD program at CERGE-EI in 2000, after having completed his B.S. and M.S. in Physics at Ural State University in Yaketerinburg, Russia. He defended his thesis at CERGE-EI in 2006, titled “Essays on Tournament Design”. In that same year, he also defended another Ph.D. dissertation in Physics at Michigan State University. He took the position at Florida State University which he still holds that same year.
His primary research interests focus on the areas of microeconomic theory, experimental economics and economic psychology. Some of his recent publications include "How corruptible are you? Bribery under uncertainty" in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, "The optimal sorting players in contest between groups" in Games and Economic Behavior and "The selection efficiency of tournaments" in the European Journal of Operational Research.
Jakub Steiner (PhD 2006)
Jakub Steiner is an Assistant Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management, and a 2011 recipient of the J. E. Purkyně Fellowship from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, which will allow him to return to CERGE-EI as tenured faculty member in 2012. After completing his PhD at CERGE-EI in 2006, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Edinburgh until 2009. His research interests, which lie within game theory and economic theory, are focused on studying behavior in strategic situations with a possibility of self-fulfilling prophecies, such as those arising during currency attacks, bank runs, revolutions, etc. Before his postgraduate studies, Jakub worked as a social worker for a Roma community and since then has been interested in the economics of discrimination.
He has two published articles in Games & Economic Behavior, plus articles in the Journal of Economic Theory, Theoretical Economics, Economics Bulletin. An article on “Communications, Timing and Common Learning” (with Colin Stewart) is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Theory, and his paper on “Who Matters in Coordination Problems?” (with József Sákovics) is under revise and resubmit at the American Economic Review.
George Vachadze (PhD 1999)
George Vachadze is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Economics and Philosophy at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) in New York City. Before coming to CERGE-EI, he received his MSc degree in Mathematics from Tbilisi State University in his native Georgia. He defended his dissertation at CERGE-EI in 1999, titled "Asset Pricing and Portfolio Allocation in Stochastic Economies with Heterogeneous Agents: Speculative and Fundamental Valuation Models". He then began a second PhD, this time in Mathematics, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He had a post-doctoral fellowship at Bielefeld University, Germany which ran until 2009, at which time he accepted his current position at the College of Staten Island (CUNY).
Some of his recent publications include "Endogenous Inequality of Nations through Asset Market Integration" in Macroeconomic Dynamics and "Capital Accumulation with Tangible Assets" (both co-authored with Volker Böhm) in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. His current research interests are in the areas of international economics, monetary theory, and economic growth.
Galina Vereshchagina (PhD 2004)
Galina Vereshchagina is currently Assistant Professor of Economics at Arizona State University. Prior to 2007, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Iowa. After completing her M.Sc. in Mathematics in 1998 at National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, Ukraine, she studied economics at to CERGE-EI, graduating with a PhD in 2004. Her dissertation entitled “Entrepreneurial Choice and Firm Dynamics” reveals Galina’s main research interests, which are Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics. Galina is the author of several working papers and her article “Risk Taking by Entrepreneurs” (with Hugo Hopenhayn) was published in the American Economic Review in 2009.
Academics in Central Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States
Inna Čábelková (PhD 2002)
Inna Čábelková is currently Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanity Studies at Charles University in Prague. She joined the faculty in 2002, not long after it was founded. Being one of the few economists in this innovating new multi-disciplinary faculty, she has taught a wide range of course covering statistics and econometrics for humanities students, cultures and organizations, along with specialized referred readings on Hayek, Friedman, Hazlitt, Grossbard-Shechtman and Knight. Before coming to CERGE-EI in 1997, Inna earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from the National University in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Karel Janda (PhD 1996)
Karel Janda is Professor at the Department of Banking and Insurance, Faculty of Finance and Accounting, University of Economics, Prague and simultaneously Transgas-RWE Professor in Economics at the Department of Microeconomics and Mathematical Methods, Institute of Economic Studies (IES-FSV) at Charles University, Prague, where he is also Department Chair. He defended his thesis, titled "The Demand for Food Imports and for Agricultural Credit" in 1996, the third PhD defense in CERGE-EI's history. After finishing at CERGE-EI, he pursued and was awarded a second PhD in economics from the University of Iowa in 2003.
He lists his research interests as Microeconomics of Banking, Credit Risk Management, Mechanism Design and Contract Theory, Asymmetric Information, Industrial Organization, Game Theory, Demand Theory, Natural Resources and Agricultural Economics, and Transition Economics. Some recent publications include "Inefficient Credit Rationing and Public Support of Commercial Credit Provision" in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, "Success in Economic Transformation of the Czech Beer Industry and Its Social Costs and Benefits" (with Jakub Mikolášek) in Transformations in Business and Economics and "Investing into Micro finance" (with Barbora Svárovská) in the Journal of Business Economics and Management.
Dmitri Kolyuzhnov (PhD 2008)
Dmitri Kolyuzhnov is an Assistant Professor at Novosibirsk State University in Novosibirsk, Russia. He received his Bachelor's degree in Econometrics in 1999 before enrolling at CERGE-EI that same year. He completed his dissertation titled "Learning and Macroeconomic Dynamics" in 2008. During his PhD studies, he participated in two specialized external research visits to the World Bank Institute (2005) and to the University of Cambridge (2006). His research interests are macroeconomic theory and policy, dynamic macroeconomics, monetary economics, adaptive learning, econometrics, social security and general equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents. Recent publications (primarily in Russian) include "Asset Pricing under Adaptive Learning in a Three-Sector Production Economy" (with Vera Tolstova) and "Progressive Tax Reform under the Heterogeneous Agents Framework" (with Andrey Orlov), both in Vestnik NGU.
International Organizations
Jacek Cukrowski (PhD 1995)
Jacek Cukrowski is an Economic Development and Trade Advisor at the Bratislava Regional Centre of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which covers the Central and Eastern Europe and CIS/Central Asian regions. Previously he has served as Regional Advisor on Millennium Development Goals for the UNDP, and before that, as an expert for the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Poland. At CASE, he participated in the evaluation of World Bank assistance to transition economies carried out by the Operation Evaluation Department of the World Bank.
As CERGE-EI‘s first graduate in 1995, he has conducted extensive research on problems of economic transition and international trade. He is an author or co-author of articles on problems of economic transition, post-communist economies and International economics. His recent work (with Manfred M. Fischer) on the efficient organization of information processing was published in Managerial and Decision Economics.
Michaela Erbenová (PhD 1997)
Michaela Erbenová is Deputy Division Chief of the Financial Sector Oversight Division at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. She joined CERGE-EI's first cohort in 1991 and defended her thesis, titled "Essays on Disequilibria in Early Transition" in 1997. Prior to joining CERGE-EI, she received her Master’s degree Mathematical Methods in Economics at Moscow State University.
Before defending her thesis, she spent a year in Paris working as a consultant to the OECD. In 1996, she returned to Prague to serve as an adviser to the then Prime Minister, Václav Klaus, and subsequently as head of advisors to the Minister of Finance and member of the Government Steering Committee for bank privatization. She subsequently held various managerial posts at Komerční banka in Prague, including as a Director of its Investor Relations section. Between 2000 and 2006, she served as Member of the Board and Chief Executive Director at the Czech National Bank (ČNB). During her mandate she was the Czech Representative on International Relations Committee and Banking Supervision Committee of the European Central Bank and a Member of the Core Principles Liaison Group, a sub-committee of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. Before joining the IMF in 2007, she was a manager in the Prague office of A.T. Kearney. She lectured at the Institute for Economic Studies (IES-FSV) at Charles University between 1997 and 2007.
Ondřej Schneider (PhD 1998)
Ondřej Schneider is Senior Economist at the Institute of International Finance (IIF), a global association of financial institutions based in Washington, D.C. and simultaneously Associate Professor at the Institute of Economic Sciences (IES-FSV) at Charles University in Prague. He joined CERGE-EI's second cohort in 1992 while finishing an MPhil degree in economics at Cambridge University and defended his dissertation, titled "Essays on Pensions", in 1998. After completing his dissertation he worked as an adviser to three Czech Ministries (Industry and Trade, Finance, and Social Affairs) before accepting the position of Chief Economist at Patria, an investment bank. He remained there until 2002, when he accepted a teaching position at the Institute of Economic Sciences (IES-FSV) at Charles University, a position he maintains from abroad while living in Washington, D.C. He was also a board member of the largest Czech energy producer, ČEZ, and a board member of a boutique investment bank, Warren Partners.
He serves as Editor, Editor-In-Chief and Editorial Board Chairman of "Finance a Úvěr – Czech Journal of Economics and Finance", a leading Czech economic journal, specializing in financial markets and public finance. He also is a Research Fellow at the CESifo, Munich, Germany. His publications in journals and newspapers are often focused on pension reform, fiscal policy, labor markets, and economic integration. Some recent publications include "Labour market institutions and their effect on labour market performance in the new EU member countries" in Eastern European Economics and "Labour Market Institutions and their Effect on Labour Market Performance in the New EU Member Countries" at CESifo.
Emil Stavrev (PhD 1999)
Emil Stavrev joined the IMF in 2001 and is currently a Senior Economist there. Prior to his move to Washington, D.C., he was a Senior Economist at the Economic Modeling Division of the Czech National Bank from 1997 to 2001. He was awarded his PhD degree in 1999; his doctoral dissertation was titled “Essays on Transition”, covering topics related to economies in transition, with the first part dealing with continuous time macro-economic modeling and the second part estimating demand systems for households based on household budget surveys. His recent work is focused on inflation, monetary policy, and international macroeconomics.
His most recent external publication is "Measures of underlying inflation in the euro area: assessment and role for informing monetary policy" in Empirical Economics (2010). In addition, he has published numerous IMF Working Papers and Reports over the past decade, including "Euro Area Monetary Policy in Uncharted Waters" in 2009 with fellow CERGE-EI alumni Martin Čihák. Some of his articles with IMF colleagues have appeared in condensed versions on VoxEU.org, a popular economic/public policy analysis website which is frequented by a number of actors in the policy-making sector.
Government / Public Sector
Lubomira Anastasova-Chirmiciu (PhD 2010)
Lubomira Anastasova-Chirmiciu had earned three MA degrees before coming to CERGE-EI from the University of Essex, Central European University in Budapest, and St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia. Nearly two years before formally defending her thesis (which was titled "Essays on Social Welfare Systems, Education and Agglomeration across the EU"), she accepted a position as Skills Employment Board Economist at the Greater London Authority (GLA) and then morphed into a similar position, Labour Market Policy Manager, at the London Development Agency, a quasi-government organization focused on public policy strategy within the GLA for the City of London under the auspices of the Mayor of London.
Martina Lubyová (PhD 2002)
Martina Lubyová is currently Member of the Scientific Council and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Forecasting at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. After completing her PhD at CERGE-EI in 2002, she worked at the International Labor Organization (ILO) as an Employment Development Specialist in the ILO's Sub-regional Office for Eastern Europe and Central Asia in Moscow, Russia. In 2008 she was appointed Director of that office. Wishing to return to more academic research, in summer 2010 she took a position in her native Slovakia at the Institute of Forecasting at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on labor markets in CEE/CIS countries along with issues of regional migration, human capital development, poverty reduction and informal economies.
In her short time back in the research sector, she has published "Foreign migration and its regional dimensions in Slovakia following EU accession", co-authored with Edita Nemcová in Prognostické práce (2010). In 2009 she authored an ILO working paper titled "Labour market institutions and policies in the CIS: Post-Transition Outcomes". Before that she contributed to the OECD's chapter on the Slovak Republic in "An International Migration Outlook: Annual Report 2006" and a similar report in 2004.
Andrei Medvedev (PhD 2006)
Andrei Medvedev is currently Senior Associate in the Economics of Financial Regulation Department of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), London. He began working at the FSA in May of 2008. Andrei defended his thesis, titled "Mergers, Antitrust, and Competition" in 2006. While writing his dissertation, he worked as a Financial Adviser for Saint-Gobain Oberland AG. Between 2005-2008, he held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for Competition Policy, University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. He focused on competition policy and regulation. Two recent publications are "The Role of Contribution among Defendants in Private Antitrust Litigation", International Review of Law and Economics 30(3), 2010 (with Morten Hviid) and "Electrifying integration: electricity production and the South East Europe regional energy market" in Utilities Policy 17(1), pp.24-33, 2009 (with Elizabeth Hooper).
Prior to his time at CERGE-EI, Andrei received his Diploma in Economics from Belaruski Dziarzhauny Universitet in Minsk, Belarus in 1997. He spent a year studying Economics at the University of Oxford, as a Soros Foundation and UK Commonwealth Fellow before receiving an Edmund S. Muskie fellowship (Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, US State Department) in 1998, moving to the US, and earning his MA degree in Economics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2000.
Business / Corporate
Ashot Baghdasaryan (PhD 2003)
Ashot Baghdasaryan is a Project Manager at COWI A/S, a Danish consulting company. Prior to joining COWI, he worked as an Executive at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Prague. He entered CERGE-EI in 1994, and worked at PricewaterhouseCooper in Prague for several years before submitting and defending his thesis in 2003, titled "Ownership Concentration and Performance in Czech Companies". His areas of consultancy work are financial/economic analysis and project evaluation, assessment of financial and operational restructuring of enterprises, issues of corporate governance, analysis of local government financing and budget balancing, financial modeling, and public/private investment valuation. He has has worked extensively in Central Europe where he has primarily focused on municipal infrastructure sector development and numerous projects for the EU, EBRD, EIB, World Bank, national and local governments.
Tomáš Kadlec (PhD 2002)
Tomáš Kadlec is currently Business Development Director at DIRECT Pojišťovna in Prague, which he joined in late 2010. His PhD dissertation, defended in 2002, was titled "A Dynamic Model of Consumers' Random Choice with Applications to the TV Market". After finishing his PhD degree, he worked as a Project Manager at McKinsey & Company's Prague office. Prior to starting his PhD studies, Tomáš earned a Master's degree in Mathematics from Charles University in Prague.
Martin Kálovec (PhD 2002)
Martin Kálovec is currently Partner and Managing Director at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Prague, which he joined in 2001. He graduated with a PhD from CERGE-EI in 2002 after defending his dissertation entitled "Essays on Contracts". Rounding out his education was a stay at Stanford University as a visiting student and a first experience in management consulting with Arthur D. Little. Prior to starting his PhD studies, Martin earned an M.Sc. degree in International Trade from the Prague University of Economics.
Kristina Lenková (PhD 2000)
Kristina Lenková is Head of Product Factory, Československá obchodní banka (ČSOB), Prague. She joined CERGE-EI’s second cohort in 1992 and defended her thesis, titled "The Unemployment Problem in Bulgaria During the Transition Toward a Market Economy" in 2000. She spent time at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna and at the Sorbonne in Paris while conducting dissertation research. Prior to joining CERGE-EI, she studied at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia. After completing her dissertation, she worked at Citicorp Investment Company as Chief Economist before moving to Komerční banka as Senior Segment Manager. She joined ČSOB in 2008.
Anna Racheva-Sarabian (PhD 2007)
Anna Racheva-Sarabian is a Vice President at Fieldman, Rolapp & Associates, a financial advisory firm located in Orange County, California, which she joined in 2003, nearly four years before formally defending her dissertation entitled "Essays on the Default of California Non-Rated Land Secured Bonds". Before joining the firm, she served as an investment banking analyst at CommerzBank in Prague and a teaching assistant in Corporate Finance at the University of California-Riverside, from where she earned her Master of Business Administration (concentration in Finance). She holds the CIPFA designation as a Certified Independent Public Finance Advisor from the National Association of Independent Public Finance Advisors (NAIPFA).
Dmitry Shemetilo (PhD 1996)
Dmitry Shemetilo is a consultant at Blackfish Capital Management in London, which operates in the investment banking industry. His interest in banking and finance began during his studies at CERGE-EI, and continued through his dissertation entitled “Essays on the Imperfections of Financial Intermediation during the Transition to a Market Economy”. After completing his PhD at CERGE-EI in 1996, he began his professional career in the banking sector at CommerzBank, where he worked as a trader and Emerging Market strategist. His experience in this field led him to the positions as an emerging market bond broker at Eiger Securities and as Director at Argo Capital Management.
