A Digest of CERGE-EI Research and Events

Located in Prague, CERGE-EI is dedicated to advancing the frontiers of economic research and graduate education. Chartered by the State of New York, CERGE-EI is a joint workplace of Charles University in Prague and the Czech Academy of Sciences, with the support of numerous donors.

Selected Journal Articles

Rational Inattention Dynamics: Inertia and Delay in Decision-Making

Jakub Steiner, Colin Stewart and Filip Matějka

Econometrica 85(2) 521-553

The paper studies how people who can acquire information at a cost behave in a series of decision problems with serially correlated incentives. The theoretical results allow to identify the decision-makers' preferences by methods akin to the standard structural estimation models. The paper helps to evaluate policies, tracking how they affect people's attention. Read more

Risk Preferences under Acute Stress

Jana Cahlíková and Lubomír Cingl

Experimental Economics 20(1) 209-236

Important decisions are made under stress and often involve risky alternatives. Although there is much evidence that stress influences decision making, little is known about whether individual attitudes to risk change. The authors randomly expose experiment participants to acute psycho-social stress and let them choose between safe and risky alternatives. They find that stress significantly increases risk aversion in men. Read more

The Impact of Telecommunication Technologies on Competition in Services and Goods Markets: Empirical Evidence

Vahagn Jerbashian and Anna Kochanova

The Scandinavian Journal of Economics forthcoming

Modern technologies, such as telecommunications and the internet, have improved productivity almost everywhere. Why have they done so and what are other potential effects of such technologies? Jerbashian and Kochanova explore these questions. Using industry-level evidence from 21 European countries, they find that these technologies have also increased product-market competition. Read more

Do EU Funds Crowd out Other Public Expenditures?

Petr Janský, Tomáš Křehlík, and Jiří Skuhrovec

European Planning Studies  24(11): 2076–2095

The authors investigate whether the provision of European Union funds augments or displaces national expenditure. Matching municipal authorities’ budgetary data on EU-funded expenditure projects with other, nationally funded expenditures, they find no evidence of systematic crowding out of local support when EU funds are increased. Read more

Selected Working Papers

Do Victories and Losses Matter? Effects of Football on Life Satisfaction

Radek Janhuba

How much does the success of your favorite sports team affect your feelings of personal well-being? Janhuba combines daily measures of “happiness” with results from local collegiate American football teams. Unexpected wins are shown to increase reported life satisfaction, explaining why even very weak teams may retain loyal fans. Read more

Automation and Job Polarization: On the Decline of Middling Occupations in Europe

Vahagn Jerbashian

How do falling prices of IT services differentially affect various groups of workers? Using data from 10 Western European countries, Jerbashian shows that the fall in IT prices has increased the demand for high wage occupations, and that this effect is much stronger for females than for males. Read more

Monetary Policy Rule, Exchange Rate Regime, and Fiscal Policy Cyclicality in a Developing Oil Economy

Aliya Algozhina

Commodity exporting developing economies are advised to target the output price index rather than the consumer price index, as the former monetary policy is automatically countercyclical against the volatile terms of trade shock. Alghozina constructs a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of joint monetary and fiscal policies for a developing oil economy to find an appropriate monetary rule. Read more

Children Left Behind: Self-Confidence of Pupils in Competitive Environments

Miroslava Federičová, Filip Pertold, and Michael L. Smith

Early tracking systems in which pupils as young as 11 must decide whether to apply to selective or general secondary schools are shown to negatively affect the self-esteem of students who opt not to compete. This effect is greater for girls. Read more