The CERGE-EI Foundation announces two types of fellowships for CERGE-EI students and alumni for the 2010/2011 academic year, both with application deadlines of May 22nd, 2010.
Graduate teaching fellowships are designed to help improve the quality of economics education in Central and Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Awards are made on a per-course basis. For more information please download the call for applications, application form and detailed rules and requirements.
Postgraduate fellowships are designed to make academic careers in the post-communist countries more attractive for such graduates by providing supplemental income that should bridge the gap between academic and private sector salaries. Awards are for 3-year terms. More information on the postgraduate fellowships can be found here.
The donor who provided funds for the fellowships believes that CERGE-EI can supply high-quality instructors who can make a difference at other universities in the region.
CERGE-EI Alumni are welcome to apply for both kids of fellowships.
One of the most widely-anticipated events on the CERGE-EI social calendar is rapidly approaching. That’s right – the (nearly) annual wine tasting of wines from around the transition and developing world.
This year it will take place on June 4th, 2010 at the CERGE-EI building (2nd Floor).
Many of you will remember this event from your time at CERGE-EI. Richard E. Quandt and Orley Ashenfelter, two of the people behind Liquid Assets (which gives an econometric basis for predicting wine vintages from all over the world) provided the impetus for this event early in CERGE-EI’s history and we are honored to be able to run it again this year.
Students are asked to bring a bottle of wine from their country of origin (or from a country in the CEE/CIS region which they have recently visited). Alumni are welcome to attend the event as well (and feel free to bring a bottle as well – red or white are both fine, but only dry wines are in the competition) so we hope to see you there!
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.
The CERGE-EI runners showed that they’re not limiting themselves to only run in the snow. This time around it was at the Hervis Prague Half-Marathon on 27 March 2010.
From L-R: Fabio Michelucci, Wadim Strielkowski, Oleg Sidorkin, Jan Myslivecek, Juraj Stancik, and Jan Hanousek
If you would like to join CERGE-EI’s running team for an upcoming event and receive your own running vest (with the CERGE-EI logo and the team’s motto (“In the long run, every crisis ends!”) please e-mail your IOI to the CERGE-EI Public Relations office.
Earlier today, Asel Isakova successfully defended her thesis, titled “Monetary Policy, Inflation and Dollarization in the Economies of Central Asia”. In doing so, she became CERGE-EI’s 100th PhD graduate since its founding. Asel came back to Prague to defend her thesis from London, where she is working at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Office of the Chief Economist as an Economic Analyst.
We sat down with Asel last week to conduct a short interview, during which she reflected on her academic work before coming to CERGE-EI in her native Kyrgyz Republic (at KRSU) and then at UPMF in Grenoble, France. Looking back in her 6 years at CERGE-EI, she remembered how demanding her first year was and also how much she benefitted from being able to spend time abroad on funded research visits to UPenn and CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).
CERGE-EI’s newly-established (and purely amateur, we are assured) running team made its first appearance at the “Palestra Kbelská 10” 10km run which took place on Saturday, 06 March 2010 in Kbely (Prague 9 district).
From left-to-right: Oleg Sidorkin, Fabio Michelucci, Juraj Stancik, Jan Hanousek, Wadim Strielkowski
The race provided the first indication of the team’s abilities before the half-marathon and the Prague City Marathon. Keep your fingers crossed and support CERGE-EI’s runners! See you in the long run!
2002 Nobel Prize co-awardee Vernon L. Smith delivered a lecture titled “Exchange, Specialization and Property Rights as a Joint Discovery Process” at CERGE-EI, Prague, Czech Republic on 25 February 2010. You can watch the presentation on YouTube -- due to file size limits it is split into five sections. The first can be seen online below.
Two distinguished CERGE-EI alums, Martin Cihák (PhD, 2002) and Tigran Poghosyan (PhD, 2008) published an article today on the influential VoxEU.org website titled “Anatomy of distress in European banks before and during the crisis“. The authors, both working at the IMF, note that there have been no comprehensive studies of bank distress covering the entire European Union as a whole.
After building their data set, their conclusions indicate that they “…find that recent financial integration policies in the EU have led to convergence of bank risks across EU members. This could justify a closer coordination of financial supervision in Europe.”
This article is not the first posted on VoxEU.org by CERGE-EI grads at the IMF. Emil Stavrev (PhD, 2000) has had articles appear recently as well, the latest being co-authored with Martin Cihák appearing just a few weeks ago on Eurozone monetary policy and Jiří Podpiera (PhD, 2005) has had two postings as well appear online.
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.
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!
