The Global Development Network (GDN) is accepting submissions for its Annual Global Development Medals Competition until September 26, 2008.

Finalists win cash prizes and a round-trip air fare with accomodation expenses to travel to a our forthcoming annual Global Development Conference. There, they have the opportunity to present their proposals/papers and development project before an eminent jury for the final round. This year, the final selection will be held in February 2009 in Kuwait City, Kuwait.

There are different deadlines for the various competitions. To learn the details of the competition, please click here or here for an information poster in .pdf format..

The Board of the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, a public research institution, announces an open competition for the position of the director of the workplace. Details can be found here

CNB/CSE/CERGE-EI seminar entitled "Public and Private Insurance" given by Prof. Giuseppe Bertola from the Universita di Torino took place at CERGE-EI on September 11. The event was hosted by Libor Dusek (CERGE-EI) and was open for general public.
The background paper is available here.

CERGE-EI will be hosting the 8th conference of the GDN / CERGE-EI Regional Research Competition on August 10-11, 2008. To see the list of supported projects, please click here

We regret to announce that Frank Vannerson, Chairman of Mt. Lucas Management, Princeton, NJ, member of the board of directors of the CERGE-EI Foundation, and friend to CERGE-EI, passed away on March 1, 2008, after a short illness.
As we mourn his passing, we celebrate having known him.
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The presentation will take place on Tuesday, April 22, at 10:00 am in room 6 (2nd floor) at the CERGE-EI building and is open to the public. It will be followed by an informal discussion in which attendees can participate and provide insights from the Czech and Central European perspectives.

Detailed information about the topic:
The speaker will outline the IMF's views on the European economic outlook at the current juncture, focusing on the likely impact of the turbulence in financial markets and how it might test the resilience of the European economy and affect prospects for economic growth and inflation. The talk will especially cover the outlook for convergence in emerging Europe, with refrence to the sustainability of rapid frowth and emerging vulnerabilities

About Dr. Subhash Thakur:
Subhash Thakur is Assistant Director in the European Department of the International Monetary Fund. A national of India, he holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego, and has extensive policy and research experience in the IMF, both in Europe and Asia. In recent years, he has headed the IMF's work on the Nordic countries and has published a book on the challenges facing the Swedish welfare state. He has taught at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and has served on the Editorial Board of IMF Staff Papers for over a decade. He currently heads the IMF's Division on Central Europe and is the mission Chief for the Czech Republic.

GDN and CERGE-EI have launched a pilot program to offer intensive, one-week courses to social science researchers on topics of specific research methodological techniques. Initially three courses will be offered (with instructors): Identification Strategies in Economics (Peter Katuscak), Applications of Time Series Econometrics (Petr Zemcik), and Sampling and Survey Design (Jan Hanousek). The first course will run from 14-18 April with the other two courses running from 21-25 April and 28 April - 2 May respectively. The deadline for applications is 4 April 2008. Limited scholarships available. For an application form and more details, please click here .

CNB/CSE/CERGE-EI seminar entitled "ROBUSTNESS ISSUES IN THE MODEL BUILDING" given by Mr. Thomas J. Sargent from the New York University took place at CERGE-EI on Wednesday, April 9 The event was hosted by Tomas Holub (CNB).

CNB/CSE/CERGE-EI seminar entitled "DO EXPECTATIONS MATTER? THE GREAT MODERATION REVISED" given by Mr. Fabio Canova from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, took place at CERGE-EI. The event was hosted by Dr. Petr Zemcik (CERGE-EI).

We are proud to share the news that Professor Jan Svejnar, a founder of CERGE-EI and Chairman of CERGE-EI Executive and Supervisory Committee, is an official candidate for President of the Czech Republic. He is the only candidate to challenge the incumbent President, Vaclav Klaus, in February when the Members of the Parliament will be choosing the new President in a secret ballot. After several months of negotiations with political leaders, Jan Svejnar officially announced his candidacy on December 14th.

Employee Loyalty conference was held on February 5, 2008. For more information please click here.
The Employee Loyalty Program (ELP) has been launched as a University Corporate Sector Partnership Initiative between CERGE-EI and the research and consulting company Ipsos Tambor. The project has been established to find out how to prevent companies from having a lack of quality employees and high turnover of quality employees and to heighten the importance of employee loyalty. The ELP provides its clients not only with an employee loyalty analysis but will also offer recommendations how to influence loyalty in the firm.

We are proud to announce that Jan Kmenta, a Professor of Economics and Statistics at the University of Michigan, U.S.A., and a Visiting Professor at CERGE-EI, has been awarded by the Czech Economics Society (Ceska spolecnost ekonomicka) an Award for Long-Term Contribution to Czech Economic Thought, an honor given by Society to significant personalities in Czech economics who have enriched economic knowledge. Professor Kmenta is the third laureate but the first economist of Czech origin who has lived most of his life abroad to receive the award. For more information please see the official press release (in Czech).

The presentation will take place on Monday, December 3, from 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm in room 7 (2nd Floor) at the CERGE-EI building and is open to the public. The full report can be downloaded from the IMF for free here. PowerPoint slides to be used during this presentation can be found here.

We are proud to announce that CERGE-EI will host the 17th NEREUS Steering Committee Meeting & the NEEO Project Meeting on December 6 -7. During these events, the CERGE-EI Library, as a new member of the network, will present its services and activities. On this occasion, 40 representatives of NEREUS members, e.g. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of Tilburg, Maastricht University, and University of Oxford, among others, will visit Prague.br>
The CERGE-EI Library is proud to be included with other leading economics libraries that have won a €2 million bid to create a subject-based repository. The project, called the Network of European Economists Online (NEEO), will address the lack of integration of academic output due to the ways that storage of and access to information is currently dispersed.

NEEO is an initiative of the Nereus consortium of academic libraries. The members of the consortium, including many of the top-twenty European academic economics institutions, together with other leading European economics research institutes, will create a networked service providing open access to economics information, showcasing Europe’s leading research results. Tilburg University will lead the project on behalf of the Nereus Consortium. The project joining 16 partners from 8 European countries will begin in September 2007, its duration is 30 months.

Based on the content of the institutional repositories of the partners, the Network will provide:
• integrated academic output, including, journal articles, working papers, chapters, conference proceedings and datasets
• a central multilingual portal and full-text search service with links to the full-text research publications and primary data output
• more comprehensive access to the life’s work of 500 leading researchers
• access to the current research results of leading institutions in the area of economics
• primary datasets with links to the publications based upon them.

Content from the partner institutions will be complemented with other European and worldwide open access economics content to create a new portal of open access economics content. NEEO content will also appear in information retrieval services of significance to the economics author and reader.

“We are very pleased with the support the European Commission is giving to this project. It confirms the interest of the EC in Institutional Repositories, open access and increasing the visibility of European research. It is encouraging that so many prominent institutions will collaborate in this area.” Hana Pessrova, Director of CERGE-EI Library.

For more information please visit the NEEO website .

The Annual Conference of the Czech Economic Society was held on Saturday, November 25, 2006. CERGE-EI economists and alumni made up the largest group of active participants from a single institution.

The following papers by current CERGE-EI members (in bold) have been accepted:

Anna Bogomolova, Dmitri Kolyuzhnov: "OPTIMAL MONETARY POLICY RULES: THE PROBLEM OF STABILITY UNDER HETEROGENEOUS LEARNING"
Eugen Kovac: “INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION IN VERTICALLY DIFFERENTIATED MARKETS WITH INNOVATION AND IMITATION: IMPACTS OF TRADE POLICY”
Volha Belush: “A LIFE-CYCLE MODEL OF SOCIAL SECURITY WITH ENDOGENOUS FERTILITY”
Libor Dušek: “POLITICAL RISK OF SOCIAL SECURITY: THE CASE OF INDEXATION OF BENEFITS IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC”
Katarina Svitkova: “CORPORATE PHILANTHROPY IN THE CZECH AND SLOVAK REPUBLICS”
Silvester van Koten: “BIDDING BEHAVIOR WHEN ONE BIDDER AND THE AUCTIONEER ARE VERTICALLY INTEGRATED; ILLUSTRATED BY THE PARTIAL DEREGULATION OF EU ELECTRICITY MARKETS”
Peter Katuscak: “SHOULD THE AVERAGE TAX RATE BE MARGINALIZED?”
Jan Hanousek, Evzen Kocenda, Jan Svejnar: “ORIGIN AND CONCENTRATION: CORPORATE OWNERSHIP, CONTROL AND PERFORMANCE”
Jan Bena, Jan Hanousek: “RENT EXTRACTION BY LARGE SHAREHOLDERS: EVIDENCE USING DIVIDEND POLICY IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC”
Jan Hanousek, Filip Palda: “ESTIMATES OF THE DISPLACEMENT DEADWEIGHT LOSS FROM TAX EVASION: A FIRM SURVEY APPROACH USING DATA FROM THE CZECH REPUBLIC”
Patrik Paneš, Alena Zemplinerova: “STATE SUBSIDIES AND COMPETITIVENESS OF CZECH MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES”
Stepan Jurajda, Daniel Munich: “ADMISSION TO SELECTIVE SCHOOLS, ALPHABETICALLY”
Daniel Munich, Ondrej Knot: “EFFICIENCY AND EQUITY IMPLICATIONS OF SELECTIVE SCHOOL ADMISSION PROCEDURES: THE CASE OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC”
Teodora Paligorova: “CZECH MANAGERIAL COMPENSATIONS: WHY DOES IT PAY OFF TO CLIMB THE CORPORATE LADDER?”
Ondrej Rydval: “FINANCIALLY STIMULATED EFFORT HITS INDIVIDUAL COGNITIVE CONSTRAINTS: EVIDENCE FROM A FORECASTING TASK WITH VARYING WORKING MEMORY LOAD”
Vitezslav Babicky, Vilem Semerak, Andreas Ortmann: “WILLINGNESS TO CONTRIBUTE WHEN INCOMES ARE EARNED:THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF RECIPROCITY AND INEQUALITY AVERSION”
Marian Krajc, Andreas Ortmann: “ARE THE UNSKILLED REALLY THAT UNAWARE? AN ALTERNATIVE EXPLANATION”
Zuzana Fungacova: “CAN MARKET FIX A WRONG ADMINISTRATIVE DECISION? MASSIVE DELISTING ON THE PRAGUE STOCK EXCHANGE”
Dmitri Kolyuzhnov, Anna Bogomolova:“SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS AND NECESSARY CONDITIONS FOR Δ-STABILITY”
Martin Fukac, Adrian Pagan, Vlad Pavlov: “ECONOMETRIC ISSUES ARISING FROM DSGE MODELS”
Tomas Cahlik, Hana Pessrova: “H-INDEX MEASURING THE CZECH ECONOMIC RESEARCH AND CZECH RESEARCHERS´ HABITS FOR GETTING RELEVANT DOCUMENT DATABASES INFORMATION”

For a preliminary program click here.

All interested students are invited to the OPEN DAY AT CERGE-EI that will be held on Friday, November 9, from 1:00 pm. The event will be opened by Jan Svejnar, a founder of CERGE-EI and Chairman of its Executive and Supervisory Committee, and Lubomir Lizal, Director of CERGE-EI. Visitors will have an opportunity to learn more details about our Ph.D. program, speak informally with CERGE-EI's alumni, faculty and students, attend research presentations etc. Prior registration is required. Details can be found on a poster.

The faculty and student body of CERGE-EI is currently made up of representatives of 31 countries from all over the world. More and more, CERGE-EI members come not only from Central and Eastern Europe but from all over the world. The fall semester 2007 saw new faculty members from the Czech Republic and Greece and students from China, Egypt, Albania and other countries join the CERGE-EI community. For a chart detailing the CERGE-EI community country-of-origin statistics click here.

A special seminar entitled "INDUSTRIAL DATA MINING: A MATHEMATICAL FRAMEWORK FOR REAL-WORLD CHALLENGES" given by Ms. Francoise Soulie Fogelman, Vice President - Strategic Business Development and University Program Manager of KXEN, USA was held on October 5. The event was jointly organized by CERGE-EI (Jan Hanousek), Mediaresearch (Pavel Charamza), PPF (Jiri Kottas) and Urbana Technologies and Tern Group and KXEN (Nicolai Machinskiy).

Czech National Bank, Czech Economic Society and CERGE-EI organized a seminar entitled "INFLATION TARGETING AND THE ROLE OF REAL OBJECTIVES" given by Carl E. Walsh, University of California, Santa Cruz. The seminar was held at CERGE-EI on September 17.

The 62nd European Meeting of the Econometric Society and The 22nd Annual Congress of the European Economic Association, the major annual economic conference in Europe, was held on August 27–31, 2007 in Budapest, Hungary. Among Czech institutions, CERGE-EI noted the highest level of active participation from its economists.

The following papers of CERGE-EI members were accepted:

Lubomira Anastassova: "DO EDUCATIONAL DIFFERENCES AND THEIR IMPACT ON EARNINGS HAMPER IMMIGRANTS?"
Ian Babetskii (co-authors: Fabrizio Coricelli, University of Siena and Roman Horvath, Czech National Bank) : "MEASURING AND EXPLAINING INFLATION PERSISTENCE: DISAGGREGATE EVIDENCE ON THE CZECH REPUBLIC"
Ian Babetskii (co-authors: Oxana Babetskaia-Kukharchuk, Czech National Bank, CES University of Paris-1 Sorbonne and State University - Higher School of Economics in Moscow and Martin Raiser, World Bank): "GRAVITY AND INTEGRATION: DETERMINANTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE AND THE FORMER SOVIET UNION"
Michal Bresky: "THE PROPERTIES OF OPTIMAL RESERVATION PRICE IN UNIFORM-PRICE AUCTION GAMES"
Levent Çelik: “MONOPOLY PROVISION OF TUNE-INS”
Levent Çelik: “STRATEGIC INFORMATIVE ADVERTISING IN A HORIZONTALLY DIFFERENTIATED DUOPOLY”
Teodora Paligorova:"CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND EXECUTIVE PAY: EVIDENCE FROM A RECENT REFORM"
Teodora Paligorova (co-author: Stepan Jurajda, CERGE-EI): "FEMALE MANAGERS AND THEIR WAGES IN CENTRAL EUROPE"
Jakub Steiner (co-authors: Amil Dasgupta, LSE and Colin Stewart, Yale): “EFFICIENT DYNAMIC COORDINATION WITH PRIVATE LEARNING“
Jakub Steiner (co-author: Colin Stewart, Yale): “COORDINATION OF MOBILE LABOR”
Silvester VanKoten (co-author: Andreas Ortmann, CERGE-EI): “THE UNBUNDLING REGIME FOR ELECTRICITY UTILITIES IN THE EU: A CASE OF LEGISLATIVE AND REGULATORY CAPTURE?”

For more information about the congress click here.

We are pleased to announce that CERGE-EI students placed first and second in the Competition for the Best Student Paper in Theoretical Economics 2007. Anna Bogomolova and Dmitri Kolyuzhnov earned first place with the paper “Optimal Monetary Policy Rules: The Problem of Stability Under Heterogenous Learning”, Sylvester van Koten earned second place with the paper “Bidding Behavior when One Bidder and the Auctioneer Are Vertically Integrated: Implications for the Partial Deregulation of EU Electricity Markets”. The aim of the competition announced by the Council of the Czech Econometrics Society is to encourage young researchers to produce quality research in the field of theoretical economics and thus to counter-balance biased and self-serving research. The competition is open to all students of Czech universities, including students in Ph.D. programs. The winning papers will be officially announced by 14 September 2007. Prizes will be awarded and the winning paper will be presented during the Autumn Day of Econometrics 2007.

CERGE-EI Library belongs among leading economics libraries that have won a €2 million bid to create a subject-based repository. The project, called Network of European Economists Online (NEEO), will address the lack of integration of academic output because of the way storage of and access to information is currently dispersed.

NEEO is an initiative of the Nereus consortium of academic libraries. The members of the consortium, including many of the top-twenty European academic economics institutions, together with other leading European economics research institutes, will create a networked service providing open access to economics information, showcasing Europe’s leading research results. Tilburg University will lead the project on behalf of the Nereus Consortium. The project joining 16 partners from 8 European countries will begin in September 2007, its duration is 30 months.

Based on the content of the institutional repositories of the partners, the Network will provide:
• integrated academic output, including, journal articles, working papers, chapters, conference proceedings and datasets
• a central multilingual portal and full-text search service with links to the full-text research publications and primary data output
• more comprehensive access to the life’s work of 500 leading researchers
• access to the current research results of leading institutions in the area of economics
• primary datasets with links to the publications based upon them.

Content from the partner institutions will be complemented with other European and worldwide open access economics content to create a new portal of open access economics content. NEEO content will also appear in information retrieval services of significance to the economics author and reader.

“We are very pleased with the support the European Commission is giving to this project. It confirms the interest of the EC in Institutional Repositories, open access and increasing the visibility of European research. It is encouraging that so many prominent institutions will collaborate in this area.” Hana Pessrova, Director of CERGE-EI Library.

For more information please visit the NEEO website .

CERGE-EI hosted the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for Economics Dynamics (SED) in June 2007. For more information please click here.

Peter Katuscak, Assistant Professor at CERGE-EI, has been awarded the Otto Wichterle Award, an honour given by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic to stimulate and encourage selected, exceptionally outstanding, promising young scientists at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for their remarkable contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge in a given area of science. The award consists of a diploma of the President of the AV CR and a reward for the successful completion of an extraordinary or especially important scientific task within a given scientific discipline. The Award was named after the deceased Otto Wichterle in memory and honour of this excellent Czech chemist, the inventor of Czech version of nylon and soft contact lenses, a scientists of a global standing and a person of high moral credit, the honorary president of the Academy of Sciences CR.

Detailed information about CERGE-EI Job Market Candidates can be found on the page http://www.phd/after/jm-cands.

Czech National Bank, Czech Economic Society and CERGE-EI organized a seminar entitled "UNEPLOYMENT DURATION: HAS LONG BECOME LONGER OR SHORT BECOME SHORTER?" given by Pedro Portugal (Banco de Portugal and Universidade NOVA de Lisboa). The seminar was held at CERGE-EI on May 3.

A reference to Dr. Jurajda’s work with Prof. Ashenfelter (Princeton University) entitled “Cross-country Comparisons of Wage Rates: The McWage Index” is published in the Economic Report of the President. The following reference can be found in the chapter on immigration (page 191): “Another study compared the earnings of fast-food restaurant workers who performed nearly identical jobs but in different countries. Again, the real wages in the United States were much higher than in several less advanced economies”.
The Economic Report of the President is available here .
Orley Ashenfelter, Stepan Jurajda: “Cross-country Comparisons of Wage Rates: The McWage Index”

CERGE-EI invites interested students to apply to its graduate program, leading to a PhD degree which is fully accredited in the United States and the Czech Republic. The program is open to students from any field. The deadline for applications is March 30. More information can be found here.

We are proud to announce that three Nobel laureates visited CERGE-EI at the end of November 2006. Professors Edward C. Prescott and James Heckman gave seminars to the CERGE-EI community and the interested public and Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz met CERGE-EI faculty and students to talk about activities and research at CERGE-EI. For details and photos from the events please click here.

We are pleased to announce that Tomas Konecny, a CERGE-EI student, has earned 3rd place (1st place among those affiliated with an institution in the Czech Republic) in the competition "Young Economist of the Year", an award of the Czech Economic Society. Tomas's winning work was the paper "Invoicing Currency, Distribution Costs, and Pricing Decisions of Firms ". Congratulations!

CERGE-EI is pleased to announce that the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen (Zapadoceska univerzita v Plzni) awarded Prof. Jan Svejnar, Chairman of the CERGE-EI Executive and Supervisory Committee, with the doctorate, Honoris Causa.

According to the first Czech ranking of economic universities made by prof. Frantisek Turnovec from the Institute of Economic Studies of the Charles University in Prague, CERGE-EI is at the top of the list, which is based on the number and quality of publications per researcher. For an article including the chart (only in Czech) please click here
We note that this ranking compares large university faculties to small departments like CERGE-EI, which gives small selective programs a natural advantage. On the other hand, in our view the ranking assigns only a small "bonus" weight to top-level publications. A listing of all publications of authors affiliated in the Czech Republic from the scientific database Web of Science is available here. It is clear that the vast majority of publications in economics with a high impact factor originating in the Czech Republic comes from CERGE-EI.

CERGE-EI hosted the EALE Conference 2006 on September 21-23, 2006. The event brought together top European labour economists as well as prominent US researchers and CERGE-EI secured the auspices of Pavel Bem, the Prague city mayor, for the conference. EALE (the European Association of Labour Economists, www.eale.nl) was founded in 1989 in order to promote the advancement of knowledge in the field of labour economics in Europe and elsewhere. EALE has more than 425 members from 25 countries and it is the European counterpart of the US Society of Labor Economists (SOLE). The partnership of local scientific organizers of the congress consisted of CERGE-EI, the Czech Economic Society and the Institute of Economics Studies of the Charles University. For more information about the conference click here.

CERGE-EI is very proud to announce that it was officially granted an absolute charter by the Board of Regents of the Education Department of New York State, a Board also granting charters outside the USA. The charter confirms the high quality of the CERGE-EI Ph.D. program in economics and the fact that it meets the U.S. standards for Ph.D. degrees. The award affirms the confidence of the Education Department of New York State in the future of CERGE-EI and the long-term sustainability of its academic programs. CERGE-EI and Central European University in Budapest are the only institutions in Central Europe to have been granted the absolute charter. A press conference on this occasion was held on Friday, September 30, 2005 at CERGE-EI. Present at the press conference were Jan Svejnar (Founder of CERGE-EI and Chairman of the Executive and Supervisory Committee), Jozef Zieleniec (Founder of CERGE-EI), Jan Kmenta (Member of the Executive and Supervisory Committee), MIchaela Erbenová (CERGE-EI Alumni), Lubomir Lizal (Director of CERGE-EI), and Daniel Munich (Deputy Director for Development&PR). For pictures from the press conference please click here

On August 9-11, 2006, CERGE-EI hosted a conference for CEE researchers who were awarded GDN Regional Research Competition grants in autumn/winter 2005. These projects are running for a maximim of 18 months from 01 January 2006, and sessions featured in-progress presentations. A listing of the awarded projects can be found here.

CERGE-EI has openings for students from Belorussia who would like to spend one semester in Prague. Studies will be focused on integral issues of Central Europe and Critical English Writing. This opportunity is provided through a grant from the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For more information please see a poster announcing this special program.

Petr Zemcik, Assistant Professor at CERGE-EI, has been awarded the Otto Wichterle Prize, the award that is given to perspective and talented researchers of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The prize consists of a diploma of the president of the AV CR and a financial premium for a successful fulfillment of an exceptional or a significant scientific project. The purpose of the prize is to appreciate an effort of young researchers and herewith to motivate other young people to work in a field of science.

The Academic Bulletin, a magazine issued by the Press Department of the Academy of Sciences, published an interesting article reflecting Stepan Jurajda's and Lubomir Lizal's thoughts about the novel rule of principles of research funding. The article can be found here (in Czech).

CERGE-EI and its director Lubomir Lizal are members that supplied the IMD with data from national/regional resources and helped distribute the survey questionnaires for the IMD's World Competitiveness Yearbook 2006. For more information about the WCY click here.

May 2006 saw 81 students beginning the Preparatory semester at CERGE-EI from 31countries. As has become a trend, these students come not only from Central and Eastern Europe but from around the world. For a chart detailing the country-of-origin statistics, click here.

Newly released macroeconomics forecasts for the Czech Republic by CERGE-EI can be found here

EIASM and CERGE-EI organized the Workshop on Financial Market Development in the Central and Eastern European Countries held on May 26 - 27 at CERGE-EI . For more information about the event click here

Czech National Bank, Czech Economic Society and CERGE-EI organized a seminar entitled "DOES OPENNESS IMPLY GREATER EXPOSURE?" given by Klaus Schmidt-Hebbel, Chief of Economic Research, Central Bank of Chile. The seminar was held at CERGE-EI on February 21.

CERGE-EI Library has joined the Nereus Network, which is an international network of library decision-makers, information-specialists, researchers, and ICT specialists, in January 2006. We are the first library from Central and Eastern Europe to join Nereus. For more information about Nereus click here.

The Forum of Young Global Leaders, an affiliate of the World Economic Forum, proudly announces that Michaela Erbenová, Member of the Board and Chief Executive Director of the Czech National Bank, has been named a Young Global Leader 2006. She is one of 44 Europeans chosen to become Young Global Leaders in 2006 and will join a global community now including 410 leaders from all regions and stakeholder groups.

Dr. Kresimir Zigic, CERGE-EI Deputy Director for Graduate Studies and a member of the faculty, wrote up a new book "Theory of Strategic Trade Policy in North-South Trade: Optimal Northern and Southern Tariffs in an Inherently Asymmetric Environment". For a pdf version of the book please click here, for Dr. Zigic's professional profile click here.

All-day conference entitled "Intellectual Property and Innovation in the Digital World" was held on Tuesday, January 17. For more information please click here.

CERGE-EI and CEFRES organized a conference "DEMOCRACY, SUSTAINABILITY AND POLICY REFORM" that took place on Monday, November 15, 2004 at CERGE-EI, Politickych veznu 7, 111 21 Prague 1. For more information on the conference please click here. Richard Disney: "Actuarial-based Public Pension Systems"
Jean-Oliver Hairault: "The Tax on Continued Activity and the Unemployment of the Elderly - Theoretical and Empirical Investigation"
Hubert Kempf: "Is Inequality Harmful for the Environment in a Growing Economy?"
Rachel Ngai, Christopher Pissarides: "Structural Change in a Multi-Sector Model of Growth"
David Stromberg: "Mass Media Competition, Political Competition, and Public Policy"
Andre Zylberberg: "Optimum Income Taxation and Layogg Taxes"

A very special Diploma Award was held on Tuesday, November 30 when William J. Cabaniss, the U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic, visited CERGE-EI to present Ph. D diplomas to two students and M.A. diplomas to twelve students. Also in attendance were Prof. Jan Svejnar and Dr. Lubomir Lizal to offer their congratulations. For photos from the event please click here.

We are pleased to announce that Eugen Kovac, a CERGE-EI student, has earned the 2nd place in the competition "Young Economist of the Year", an award of the Czech Economic Society. Eugen's winning work "Tying by a Non-monopolist" can be found on the list of working papers in the section "publications".

This year’s edition of the traditional Czech Republic Series called "Czech Republic 2005: Year After" has recently been published. If you would like to obtain an independent overview of all the main socio-economic developments in the Czech Republic, both in 2004 and forthcoming, prepared by the Czech and international researchers of CERGE-EI, please contact the Development & Public Relations Office. For more information and a Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) version click here.

September 2005 saw 36 students beginning their Ph.D. studies at CERGE-EI from 14 countries. As has become a trend, these students come from not only from Central and Eastern Europe but from around the world. For a chart detailing the 2005 cohort's country-of-origin statistics, click here.

CERGE-EI is pleased to announce that it has been placed on the list of NERO participants connected with OECD activities. NERO is a network National Economic Research Organisations which exchange information, discuss evolving research agendas and identify new issues. The OECD acts as a facilitator in this process, and hosts meetings of NERO representatives. For more information click here

For more info see http://www.cerge-ei.cz/macroworkshop

CERGE-EI hosted a global conference on educational research in developing and transition countries sponsored by the Education Policy Research Network of the Global Development Network (GDN) from 31 March - 02 April 2005. To download the conference program, please click here.

CERGE-EI is proud to anounnce that its researchers were part of the team of specialists that worked out the study "Economic and Marketing Study of Organizining the Summer Olympic Games in Prague in 2016, or 2020".

Jim Mollen, a U.S. State Department official who was a special adviser to the Iraqi education ministry, was killed in Baghdad on November 24, 2004 by a group linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Jim is the second U.S. diplomat to be killed in the Iraq war. Jim was a great help to CERGE-EI in the last year, giving assistance in our recruitment effort in Iraq. It was certainly not his official duty to help us, but he donated his time and effort to our program. Jim even visited CERGE-EI while he was on vacation to discuss the program and see the building, and planned to stop by again on his way home from Iraq after his service there ended. He will be sorely missed by CERGE-EI. Jim Mollen’s contribution to education and his faith in the future will not be forgotten, and we at CERGE-EI pledge that his mission will not be allowed to fail.