IES Students and Alumni Were Awarded the CES Awards

The Czech Economic Society (CES) awards the Young Economist of the Year Award to members of the Czech economics community under 30 years of age every year, who register for the competition by submitting their original, professional papers. 
Furthermore, the CES can also decide to award the Karl Engliš Prize to the paper best dealing with Czech economic policy. 

We are happy to see our students and alumni among the laureates regularly.

CES Awards 2020:

• Young Economist of the Year - the main prize laureate
  is Bruno Baránek with his paper “Quality of governance and design of public procurement”.

  Bruno Baránek is an alumnus of our bachelor's program, who is now pursuing his doctoral studies at Princeton University, USA.
  His award-winning paper deals with the optimal regulation of the public procurement market.
  Using machine learning, causal estimating and structural models, it shows that public procurement authorities in the Czech Republic are not acting optimally. Contracting authorities are not investing sufficiently in the quality of projects, are choosing unsuitable suppliers, and often succumb to the influence of companies. Empirical analyses show that the improvement of the institutional environment of the state administration would lead to savings of 2% of GDP. Better regulation, which would limit the powers of contracting authorities and introduce unbiased quality criteria, may save over 1% of GDP. Therefore, the quality of the institutional environment is crucial for the regulation setting.
   

• Young Economist of the Year - third place 
  was won by Marek Šedivý for his paper “Mortality shocks and household consumption: The case of Mexico”
  Marek Šedivý studies in our doctoral program. His award-winning paper focuses on the influence of the death of a household member on that household’s consumption. Unlike most of the previous studies dealing with this problem, he distinguishes the type of death based on the characteristics of the deceased as it has a significant influence on the household’s consumption.
   
• The Karl Engliš Prize for the best paper on Czech economic policy
  was given to Dominika Ehrenbergerová and Josef Bajzík, for their paper 
  „The Effect of Monetary Policy on House Prices – How Strong is the Transmission?“
  Both authors study in our doctoral program and also work at the Czech National Bank. 
  In their paper titled ‘The Effect of Monetary Policy on House Prices—How Strong is the Transmission?’, they deal with the influence of monetary policy on real estate prices using a meta-analysis of complex empirical literature that often reports different results. They collected over 1,400 estimations of effects of short interest rates on real estate prices from 31 studies. The synthesis of results shows that an increase in the interest rate by 1% reduces prices by 0.7% on average after one year. After adjusting the publication selectivity, the effect of monetary policy remains significant on its horizon. The paper is particularly beneficial in the current period of low interest rates and rapid growth of real estate prices.
   

The awards will be presented ceremoniously at the XI biennial conference of the CES and will take place in May 2021 at the University of Economics and Business, Prague.

Congratulations!