Would you like to achieve greater success in your career? There is no universal recipe how to do so, but here I take the opportunity to present the story of one of our professors, who has recently become a Member of the Bank Board of the Czech National Bank. He has been Citigroup Endowment Associate Professor at CERGE-EI receiving tenure in 2004, and also served as a Director of CERGE-EI. He is the author of 20 articles, 25 books and chapters in books, 30 working and discussion papers and many publications in popular press. He is also the holder of a significant number of grants and tenders. Do you know who is he? Professor Lubomir (Mirek) Lizal. Being impressed by his spectacular career progress, I decided to investigate how Lubomir achieved his success.

Before starting at CERGE-EI, you studied System Programming, which was rather mathematical. Why did you decide to switch to Economics?
My background was even more exotic from today’s perspective. I had a degree in electronic computer engineering, system programming. Before that I pursued general electric engineering. When I started studying (that was during the Communist time) there was no economics without ideology. In addition, I liked technical sciences and I think I had a talent for them. So I opted for something which was closer to Mathematics, something based on physical principles, where there was no ideological influence and the principles were the same all over the world. Electrons do not move according to ideology but according to physical laws. That was basically the main reason why I preferred engineering to any social science. But when I graduated from the university – which was just after the collapse of the Soviet bloc – there was a possibility to study something different. My schoolmates and I started a small computer consulting company in the 1990’s. We deemed economics was a must for the business. Once I started studying the subject I liked it and therefore decided to stay with economics.

Did mathematical background help you in your economic career?
In fact it did. I don’t think that there is a possibility to be a good economist without knowledge of math today. We have lots of theories, but the theory is just a “maybe” theory until you prove it, or more correctly, disprove the opposite! On that purpose we need tools which can verify whether these theories match the real world or, in Hegelian sense, we can falsify these.

Why did you decide to apply for a Ph.D. program at CERGE-EI?
Frankly speaking, it was a coincidence. CERGE-EI was at the same building as the Central European University (CEU), where I applied for. If you entered the building there was the CEU on the left hand side of the corridor and CERGE-EI on the right hand side. In that corridor I met a CERGE-EI Professor (ed. – Vladimir Benáček) who asked me: ’You applied to CEU. Why don’t you apply for CERGE-EI as well?’ So I did. That is how I entered CERGE-EI.
During my studies I also went for mobility to Tinbergen Institute, University of Pittsburgh and to the University of Michigan. During that time I realized that the knowledge gained at CERGE-EI was quite strong as I didn’t have any problems with similar or neighboring courses abroad. Moreover, sometimes I knew even more than these courses were about! Therefore I strongly believe that entering CERGE-EI was more than lucky coincidence.

That means that your mobility allowed you to experience studying in both European and American systems of education. Is there any difference between these two systems? Did you benefit from the American system of education, which is prevailing at CERGE-EI?
It’s hard for me to compare. There was not much difference for me from the first sight. Just like at the Technical University, I was studying in a small group at CERGE-EI and at first we needed to get some amount of theory before trying to apply it. The difference which was visible and which I benefited from was the availability of professors. The direct access to the professors is the biggest advantage of small PhD programs. In addition, at CERGE-EI you could just knock on a door of big names of visiting professors in economics and have a talk. Abroad, at big universities you can chase these big names for weeks before getting an appointment.
There was, and still is, however, one big difference from similar programs abroad. Students applying for CERGE-EI were not required to have a particular background: some of us even didn’t study any social sciences but had good theoretical and mathematical skills, some vice-versa.

Do you think studying at CERGE-EI helped you to get to where you are now? Was education at CERGE-EI sufficient?
CERGE-EI is definitely a great school. I think it provides perfect education in Economics and I would consider it on a par with the leading universities. CERGE-EI gave me very a important thing which helped me a lot in my career, particularly, the knowledge of how to ask economic questions and how to answer them correctly. If you do not have a perfect question, you don’t find even a mediocre answer!
CERGE-EI gave a lot but of course having good theoretical knowledge was not enough. To be good in your field you need to do a lot of independent study. However, CERGE-EI taught me the approach one has to use in the field to be successful: knowing what to do when you don’t have enough knowledge of the field and how to start your own research.

With regard to finding good research questions: how do you manage to find ideas which become interesting for publishers?
My starting point in the research is data. If I see a good data set, I start thinking what might be the economic question that can be answered with this data. It is always problematic to get the right data for the hypothesis you would like to test. On the other hand, once you know the data, and this is again linked to my background in programming, then you might be thinking what the data might be used for and which hypotheses you can test with the data. So, this is, in a way, a vice–versa approach. From a practical standpoint, it is easier since I am not stuck with a problem of having a nice theory and needing certain data, which were not readily, if at all, available.

Looking through the list of your publications it is visible that your major field is microeconomics. However, there is a common belief that to get a position at the Central Bank one should have macroeconomic background. Does it mean that microeconomists also can point to such positions or it’s just your particular case?
First of all, I would consider myself to be an applied microeconomist. Concerning macroeconomic background, doing research in macro does not mean that you would have the feeling for the real economy development in the future. What is rather more useful at the Central Bank is having rather more general feeling of what is important in the economy, what might be the driving force in the future. As we say, today’s data is a history for a central banker. From this perspective, having macro or micro background is neither advantage, nor disadvantage.

Your work career started rather early when you were studying at the Czech Technical University. Since then you haven’t stopped working.
I was always trying to put the work together with the research and with the study so that I could be to a high degree independent irrespectively of what I was doing.

Did this help you much in your professional growth?
In a sense, yes. In general terms, the working experience gives you the feedback on the things that allows you to figure out what are the important questions, especially for the research.

Apart from what was mentioned earlier which abilities/skills should an economist possess to become successful in his/her professional life?
I think you need a bit of everything. Sometimes you need the skills, sometimes you have to work hard, sometimes you need to use your good education, a bit of luck and sometimes you need to make choices in a highly uncertain environment. I was able – or maybe lucky – to make the right choices at the right time and that was the part of my career. So, my strategy is a mix of skills, knowledge, zeal, and intuition acknowledging that sometimes one has to make a decision without sufficient amount of information.

You are not only a successful economist but also a father. It seems that it’s very difficult to succeed both at work and in personal life. What is your ‘recipe’ for this?
The important part of that is that you don’t take your work at home unless really necessary. You need to have the general sense about the proper division between your personal and professional life. You have to try hard to have both; to have just one is not the best practice.

What advice would you give to current CERGE-EI students for them to become good in their field?
First, to be a good economist you need to have a general knowledge of all the economic fields, not just your own favorite one., One has to understand what is going on in other fields just for the purpose that often you realize that something that is happening in another field can influence your own field and it can inspire you in future development.
Second, when you are selecting which field you would like to do, it should be based on personal preference. Choose something you are really interested in, something you like for its own sake rather than choosing something just because of some envisioned career concerns. You might have a situation when the world changes and then it is good to have the field that you like on its own, not just because it is well paid. Something that makes you motivated also intellectually for its own merit. When students are making the decision whether they will stay in academia or they will go in the business, they should be sure to know what they would like to do in those roles. And to know that if you like something for that moment think also whether you will be able to do it not for the next five or ten years, but even after that.

Irina Momotenko, 2nd year CERGE-EI student