Life after New Economic Talent: Interview with Salim Turdaliev

As we count down the days till The New Economic Talent 2016 deadline, we did a bit of reflecting on previous NET competitions. Last year, the top three of 138 submissions presented their thesis in Prague and a total of $1500 USD was awarded to winners. But the benefits of the competition go beyond just money and travel; we caught up with past NET finalist, Salim Turdaliev, to gain a fresh insight into the contest and his life in academia today. Continue reading Life after New Economic Talent: Interview with Salim Turdaliev

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Fiscal Policy Council: Personal Trainer or Watchdog?

This post was prepared by Geghetsik Afunts, a second year PhD student at CERGE-EI.

Do governments need a “Personal Trainer or Watchdog” to achieve objectives such as long-term sustainability of public finances, economic growth or surplus targets? Fiscal watchdogs have existed for a long time in some countries and one of the first European countries was Sweden. But the Chairman of the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council John Hassler says that in practice such institutions are considered more as personal trainers than watchdogs. Continue reading Fiscal Policy Council: Personal Trainer or Watchdog?

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Stupid Voters or Stupid Economists?

Observers of the recent Greek referendum, the vote on Scottish independence or the U.S. presidential campaign know that voters often vote based on their emotions rather than on rational thinking. I suggest that this is in large part because professional economists are failing to serve the public well. And as economists, if we want rational outcomes, then we need to redouble our efforts to build economic literacy.

America’s national cynic, H. L. Mencken once said, “When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas…men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion.”

It’s easy to be cynical about democracy, but economists may have a different take on why voters largely vote with their emotions instead of their intellect.  It is not that voters can’t or don’t want to make sensible policy choices – rather, it is that they have little incentive to do so. Continue reading Stupid Voters or Stupid Economists?

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Energy economics: on bread, yetis and Utopia

Are you charged up by change? Do you thrive on uncertainty? Are you turned on by the quirky? Answer yes to all of the above and you might want to delve deeper into the field of energy economics. And with energy security fast becoming a priority on national agendas, there are increasing career opportunities for economists with specialized energy expertise. Continue reading Energy economics: on bread, yetis and Utopia

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CERGE-EI Founder Jan Švejnar wins the 2015 IZA Prize in Labor Economics

The IZA Prize in Labor Economics is widely considered to be the field’s most prestigious award. So we are delighted that the 2015 prize has been awarded to CERGE-EI Founder, Professor Jan Švejnar. He is the latest in a line of distinguished recipients that includes Professors Jacob Mincer, Orley Ashenfelter, David Card, Alan Krueger, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides. Continue reading CERGE-EI Founder Jan Švejnar wins the 2015 IZA Prize in Labor Economics

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The light and dark sides of the shadow economy

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It’s not often you get the chance to sit in a room with a collection of today’s most influential minds and hear their thoughts and opinions on current global issues. But that’s what I was able to do this week at a panel discussion in London organized by CERGE-EI Alumni with the Legatum Institute and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. “The Shadow Economy – Impact on Innovation, East and West” was moderated by Edward Lucas, senior editor at The Economist, with contributions from Andrei Kirilenko (MIT), Peter Sanfey (EBRD), Tina Fordham (Citibank), Giles Andrews (Zopa) and CERGE-EI’s own Jan Švejnar. Continue reading The light and dark sides of the shadow economy

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Tribute to Boris Nemtsov

We are enormously shocked and saddened to learn of Friday’s assassination in Moscow of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. In 2011, Mr Nemtsov took part in our 20th anniversary celebrations when he joined a panel discussion at the Forum 2000 Annual Conference co-hosted by CERGE-EI to consider the issues facing legal institutions in transition countries. We would like to pay tribute to this staunch and fearless opponent of corruption. His violent and premature death is a huge loss to all supporters of democracy.

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A recipe for inspiration

DSC_0198Take one ambitious and curious junior researcher. Give him three months in a city that is home to some of the world’s top learning institutions. Offer him the chance to test his ideas with thought leaders in his field. What happened? We asked Vojta Bartos.

Vojta specialises in development and behavioral economics. He is currently investigating how extreme and seasonal shocks impact the enforcement of social norms, focusing on agricultural communities in Afghanistan. He spent the fall semester of 2014 at New York University. Now back in Prague, he shared his recent experience with us.
Continue reading A recipe for inspiration

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Did the Patriarch Cause a Baby Boom in Georgia?: Research by CERGE-EI PhD Student Lasha Lanchava

The following post was written by CERGE-EI PhD Student Lasha Lanchava, originally appearing on the ISET Economist blog.

Georgia Orthodox Church
The Orthodox Church of Georgia operates wonderful monasteries and churches, preserving Georgian cultural heritage. But is the church also responsible for the increase of birth rates in recent years? (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In October 2007, responding to the problem of very low birthrates in the country, Ilia II. of Georgia, the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia, announced that he would personally baptize any third and subsequent child born to Orthodox families from that time onwards. This promise seems to have had a considerable impact on the reproduction behavior of Georgians. According to the National Statistics Office of Georgia (NSOG), the number of births increased from about 49,000 in 2007 to about 57,000 in 2008 and 63,000 in 2009. This is a remarkable 28% increase in two years’ time, while the number of births from 2000 to 2007 had been fluctuating between 46000 and 49000. At the end of 2008, the Patriarch for the first time baptized thousands of babies at the Sameba Cathedral, and the tradition continues until today.

In March 2009, the BBC brought the enthusiastic headline: “Church leader sparks Georgian baby boom”. The article states that “two years after having one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Georgia is enjoying something of a baby boom, following an intervention from the country’s most senior cleric”. The results are, in the words of the Georgian Orthodox Church, “a miracle”. A report with a similar message was published by CNN on April 2010 in which the Patriarch himself claims credit for the surge in births: “I have already baptized about 5,000 children. […] Parents decided to give birth to these children because they had a chance to be the Patriarch’s godchildren.”

The BBC also interviewed the head of Georgia’s civil registry, Giorgi Vashadze. More profanely, he attributed the increased birth rates to accelerated economic growth and increased employment in the years after the Rose Revolution: “Who is now creating families? People who five years ago were out of work,” he said. “Previously, they had no income. They could not get married. Today they are working. They have salaries… So I think this is a major factor.” According to the NSOG, Georgia did indeed experience a remarkable growth in real GDP by about 10 % in 2006 and 2007, going down in 2008 due to war with Russia but still remaining significantly higher than in the previous years.

According to the Caucasus Research Resource Center (CRRC), 94% of the Georgians consider the Patriarch to be the most trustworthy man in the society, and likewise, the church is the most trusted institution in Georgia. Therefore, the opinion of Georgian public can be easily swayed in favor of the church. But is the Patriarch really responsible for the stunning increase of the birth rate in Georgia? Using the toolbox of quantitative economic analysis, I wanted to find out…

A NATURAL EXPERIMENT

Religion as an important driver of socio-economic developments can be traced back to Max Weber’s famous 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, relating the differences in per-capita GDP in Europe to the respective shares of Protestants and Catholics in those countries. Ever since, a huge body of literature has elicited connections between religious beliefs and economic behavior. For example, McCleary and Barro (2003) show that countries with high levels of religious observance (operationalized as attendance at religious services) tend to experience lower GDP growth. Crabtree (2010) explores the link between the share of religious population of a country and its and per-capita incomes. Lipford, McCormick, and Tollison (1993) look at the connection between the rates of church membership and crime and various demographic numbers like divorce, marriage, and fertility.

In our setting, the announcement of the Catholicos-Patriarch’s initiative yields what economists call a “natural experiment”. In the laboratory, it is possible to define a treatment group and a control group, yet many economic questions which are about the society as a whole cannot be answered in the lab. A natural experiment is a situation where for natural reasons there is something like a treatment and something like a control group. In the problem at hand, the majority of Orthodox Christians (OCs), making up 84% of the population, can be considered a treatment group, as they are the only ones to whom the Patriarch’s initiative appeals. The Non-Orthodox Christian (NOC) ethnic minorities, such as Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and other congregations can be considered as a control group, if we assume that the Patriarch’s announcement will not affect their reproduction behavior. The majority of NOC population consists of Armenians and Azerbaijanis who comprise about 15 % share of the total population of Georgia. Armenians are members of the Armenian Apostolic Church and Azerbaijanis are Shiite Muslims. The figure shows the composition of Georgian population by religious belief – the brighter the color, the higher the share of NOC population (except for the occupied territories, which are not included in the analysis).

Map

Using a methodology called difference-in-differences (DID), we can identify whether the religious leader’s initiative had causal impact on the birth rates in Georgia.

Continue reading Did the Patriarch Cause a Baby Boom in Georgia?: Research by CERGE-EI PhD Student Lasha Lanchava

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