Before sending my previous blog post for editing, I read the final version and realized I had just finished writing a boring piece of text… Columbia this, Columbia that, Ivy league, Nobel prize winners, presidents, big shots and that kind of thing – all that you know from Wiki pages. I finally decided to write something more personal about mobility stay during the Spring semester, 2011 at Columbia University.
Continue reading Going on Mobility, Becoming a Bartender
Category Archives: PhD
First Year at CERGE-EI: Investment in the Rest of My Life
It began at the end of December 2009 when a CERGE-EI student came back to Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine – his hometown and mine – to give a presentation about CERGE-EI. I was intrigued by the opportunities that CERGE-EI was offering. I wanted to get an MA degree in economics from a foreign school, and then maybe a PhD. At my home university, Zaporizhzhya National Technical University, I would be receiving only a Specialist degree in International Economic Relations.
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CERGE-EI in Media: Stepan Jurajda on Reforms in the Czech Republic
The following article first appeared on March 28th in the Prague daily newspaper, Lidove Noviny. It was translated from Czech into English by Jan Novotny and edited by Stepan Jurajda.
It Is Better To Not Reform Than Implement a Bad Reform
March 28 2011
Reforms in the Czech Republic are poorly prepared and rarely fully completed and accomplished, said Stepan Jurajda, Director of CERGE-EI, which is devoted to economic research and doctoral studies. According to him, the country lacks an independent expert institution, where reform ideas as well as impacts would be thoroughly analyzed and evaluated.
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New Faculty: Who are they? Meet Filip Matejka
This interview with Filip Matějka is the third in the series about new CERGE-EI faculty. Filip Matejka, together with Michal Bauer, Michal Pakos and Jakub Steiner, has accepted offer to join the CERGE-EI faculty. Each of them brings a different set of attributes to his new position and has pursued a different path toward an academic career.
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First Summer in Prague, or How to Survive at CERGE-EI
It’s amazing to realize all the changes that I went through over the last six years at CERGE-EI. Orange color is no longer dominant in my wardrobe, even though I still have the short orange skirt I was wearing in the preparatory semester of summer 2005. But this series is not about such changes. Its main purpose is to share the practical information about life at CERGE-EI and in Prague that I have accumulated over these years.
My first post is about the preparatory semester.
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New Faculty: Who are they? Meet Michal Bauer
This interview with Michal Bauer is the second in the series about new CERGE-EI faculty. Each of them brings a different set of attributes to his new position and has pursued a different path toward an academic career. Michal has been recently awarded the Otto Wichterle Award for being an exceptionally outstanding and promising young scientist at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and for his remarkable contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge in a given area of science. His article with Julia Julie Chytilová and Jonathan Morduch on “Behavioral Foundations of Microcredit: Experimental and Survey Evidence from Rural India” is being published in the American Economic Review.
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Building the future by going back: research on return migration in India
Over recent decades the phenomenon of return migration has been a topic of intense discussion among academics and policy makers. Return migration is viewed as a potential development channel for the least developed countries and represents an opportunity to reverse brain drain into the brain gain. During the last two years, interest in this topic has taken Renata Invanova, a 5th year PhD student at CERGE-EI as far as India and the US, pursuing the theoretical and empirical aspects of return migration that form the basis of her dissertation.
“India astonishes you with the mixture of sounds, smells, and scenery from the moment you step off the plane on kilometers of carpets that cover the entire Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. It astonishes you by the dramatic inequality, an overwhelming poverty in the midst of which you never see a gloomy face, but only smiles. By its desire to outpace China in population by the year 2014. By the fact that everyone speaks English, which makes the country so attractive for foreign professionals and tourists. By the power of the caste system, which still permeates life and determines, for instance, admission quotas to high schools and universities, as well as possibilities for marriage. And by rush hour traffic at 10pm when the streets are packed with BPO (business process outsourcing) employees rushing to be at their jobs by the time America and Europe wake up,” says Renata. “It was the adventure of a lifetime.”
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New Faculty: Who are they? Meet Jakub Steiner
Michal Bauer, Filip Matejka, Michal Pakos and Jakub Steiner have all recently accepted offers to join the CERGE-EI faculty. Each is outstanding in unique ways. Each brings a different set of attributes to his new positions and has pursued a different path toward an academic career. To introduce our new professors, we are interviewing them over the next several weeks to explore the most interesting aspects of their research, teaching and work experience.
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The Path To Success
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.
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CERGE-EI Mobility: To Go, or Not To Go?
I wonder how you would answer this question. As for me, there is only one correct answer. Benjamin Franklin once said, “When in doubt, don’t.” I would rephrase his wise words in the following way, “If you have any doubts about whether to go on mobility, don’t. Just go!” By sharing my mobility experience with you, I want to explain why I think so.
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