In the new book Empires, Nation-States, and Democracies, Gérard Roland argues that the great political struggle of the coming decades will not simply be between democracy and authoritarianism, but between competing models of political organization: empires, ethnic nation-states and open democracies. Professor Roland has a long-standing connection to CERGE-EI, having served for many years on its Executive and Supervisory Committee (ESC) and as a member of the CERGE-EI Board of Trustees. In this interview, he explains why nation-state projects ultimately collide with democratic values, why Russia and China face structural vulnerabilities, why American retreat could reshape the global order, and why he remains optimistic about democracy’s long-term future despite today’s democratic backsliding, wars and geopolitical instability. Continue reading Gérard Roland: Democracy’s Future Lies Beyond the Nation-State
Monthly Archives: August 2026
Designing Experiments for Better Policy
Policy effects can differ substantially across people, especially when individuals decide for themselves whether to participate. Recent CERGE-EI PhD graduate Maksim Smirnov, winner of this year’s Best Conference Paper Award at the Royal Economic Society Annual Conference 2026 for his paper Treatment effects identification and testing via reduced-form projections, develops new statistical methods for testing how the effects of policies differ across people, with practical applications for policy evaluation. His new statistical test shows how experiments with multiple levels of incentives can reveal whether treatment effects differ across otherwise unobserved groups, offering researchers a simple way to assess how far their findings may generalize. In the following text, Maksim Smirnov presents the key ideas behind his award-winning paper and explains their implications for policy analysis and design. Continue reading Designing Experiments for Better Policy
Detecting Neurodegenerative Diseases Earlier: How Czech and Swiss Researchers Are Developing Remote Screening Tools
In this interview, Radim Boháček, PhD. (CERGE-EI) discusses a Czech-Swiss project developing smartphone-based tools for the early detection of neurodegenerative diseases as part of the neuroSHARE project, titled Remote Assessment of Neurodegenerative Diseases and Dementia. The broad collaboration includes members of the neuroSHARE research team — Vojtěch Illner, PhD., Pavla Mašková, Jan Rusz, PhD. from CTU FEL – Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and Petr Dušek, MD, PhD. from the First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University — as well as partners from Université de Lausanne (UNIL) and the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS). Continue reading Detecting Neurodegenerative Diseases Earlier: How Czech and Swiss Researchers Are Developing Remote Screening Tools