About
Vincenzo Merella, Director, International Research Centre
The International Research Centre (IRC) was established in 2018 as a project of the Faculty of International Relations (FIR), Prague University of Economics and Business (VŠE). IRC is committed to develop a community of scholars and promote a broad range of initiatives that inspire, nurture, and disseminate rigorous empirical and theoretical research in all fields of economics, with a particular focus on international economics. IRC provides a dynamic and international research environment to FIR affiliates, as well as fellows from other faculties of VŠE and visiting scholars, to share ideas and foster research collaborations.
International Research Team
Vincenzo Merella, Ph.D.
Director I International Research Center
Vincenzo Merella is the Director of the International Research Center at the Faculty of International Relations. His main research interests are macro-finance; economic development, innovation and growth; and international trade, with a particular focus on the role of product quality and non-homothetic demand in influencing trade patterns. He has published in high-quality international journals such as the Journal of the European Economic Association and the Journal of International Economics.
Laure de Batz, Ph.D.
Laure de Batz is an assistant professor and researcher at the Faculty of International Relations since September 2020. Her research interests include financial market, regulation, white-collar crimes, and applied econometrics. Her published papers have studied market reactions to enforcement decisions, in France, and more generally possible publication bias in this field of the literature and the reasons for contradictory findings.
Smaranda Pantea, Ph.D.
Smaranda Pantea is an Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Faculty of International Relations. Her research interests focus on the effects of economic policies, consequences of technological change, especially ICT, and the economic transition in CEE. Previously, she worked at the Faculty of Business Administration at University of Economics in Prague, Ministry of Public Finance in Romania, European Commission and University of Bristol. She has a PhD in Economics from University of Nottingham.
Cristina Procházková Ilinitchi, Ph.D.
Ing. Cristina Procházková Ilinitchi, Ph.D. has been an assistant professor at the Department of World Economy since 2016. In 2015, she defended her dissertation on the topic of the Impacts of Immigration from Third Countries on the European Union Labour Market. As part of her research activities, she focuses on two main thematic areas. The first is migration and its impact on the labour market and the issue of remittances. The second is related to the impacts of Industry 4.0 on migration processes and labour markets.
Ondřej Sankot, Ph.D.
Ondrej Sankot is an assistant professor at the Faculty of International Relations. His research interest is concentrated on international trade, especially international knowledge spillovers, focusing on transfers within global value chains in Central Europe.
Jana Vlčková, Ph.D.
Jana Vlčková is an associate professor at the Department of International Economic Relations, Faculty of International relations, the Prague University of Economics and Business. Her research focus is in economic geography, covering topics related to technology, patents, smart specialization, and upgrading in global value chains/production networks, particularly in the CEE region. She published a book on global production networks in Visegrad countries. She participates in research projects with foreign universities (e.g., ETH Zurich, Columbia University) and cooperates with the business sector.
Ayaz Zeynalov, Ph.D.
Ayaz Zeynalov is an Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Faculty of International Relations since September 2017. His research interests include natural resource economics, economic development, institutional governance, and applied econometrics. His published papers have studied possible publication bias and the reasons for contradictory findings in the natural resource literature, as well as the role of institutional governance on the negative relationship between natural resource richness and economic development, particularly in developing countries.
International Research Affiliates
Lubomír Cingl
Lubomír Cingl is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics of the Faculty of Economics, and a CERGE-EI Foundation Teaching Fellow. His research areas include mainly behavioral and experimental economics and social psychology, covering topics such as the effects of time pressure and stress on human behavior, theories of secularization and religious (and non-standard) beliefs; dishonesty, antisocial & delinquent behavior; risk-preferences; and individual willingness to compete. He published e.g. in the Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science, PLOS ONE, Evolution and Human Behavior, and other prestigious journals.
Monika Junicke
Monika Junicke is a Deputy Division Director and Senior Analyst at the Macroeconomics and Fiscal Analysis Division of The Office of the Czech Fiscal Council. Her research areas include monetary economics and macroeconomics, covering topics such as estimating and forecasting small open economy models and studying endogenous non-zero trend inflation. She published internationally renowned journals such as Macroeconomic Dynamics.
Tomáš Miklánek
Tomáš Miklánek is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics. He is also a director of the Laboratory of Experimental Economics. His research interests are mainly Experimental and Behavioral Economics. His published papers in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics are focused on social preferences under information asymmetry, and the relationship between personal traits and trading outcomes in the experimental asset markets. His other research projects study conditional cooperation and tax designation mechanism.