FIR Will Work on Two New Projects Supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic

The Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (GA CR) decided to finance projects in the areas of basic research for the coming year. The competition was really great, the agency saw a significant increase in applications for support. GA CR will thus distribute funds in the total amount of CZK 4.2 billion.

The Faculty of International Relations, which will take part in two supported projects, has achieved great success:

Winners and losers: Who benefits from the work of the Czech National Bank? Heterogeneous impact of monetary policy on companies and households

PhDr. Mgr. Jakub Matějů, M.A., Ph.D., Prague University of Economics and Business, Faculty of International Relations

The project leader is Jakub Matějů (VŠE, ČNB), other members include Monika Junicke (VŠE, UNRR), Haroon Mumtaz (Queen Mary, University of London) and Angeliki Theophilopoulou (Brunel University London). This study has two objectives, to show how different firms benefit from monetary policy and how it affects their decisions, and to reveal how monetary expansion affects labor income inequality.

The Czech National Bank (CNB) actively uses both conventional and unconventional monetary policy instruments, of which some companies and households benefit more than others. Because the literature usually focuses on the impact of monetary policy on aggregates and large economies, we identify a significant knowledge gap in measuring the heterogeneous impact of monetary policy in a small open economy. The CNB’s exchange rate commitment to the euro and the series of significant changes in interest rates that accompanied it provide a unique opportunity to fill this gap. On the one hand, individual data at the enterprise level will allow us to examine whether export-oriented firms have benefited more from expansionary policies in terms of revenue, value added or profit; and how this policy has affected corporate recruitment or investment decisions. On the other hand, using unique individual wage data, we can identify the distributional effects of monetary policy on individual households’ income, and thus examine the extent of monetary policy to which shocks affect wage income inequality.

The energy discourse of the European Commission and the European Parliament and its impact on the Member States
Mgr. et Mgr. Lukáš Tichý, Ph.D., Institute of International Relations, v.v.i.

The project focuses on research of the impact of the EU’s energy discourse (reflecting in particular energy security) on selected EU Member States (Czech Republic, Germany, France, Italy and Sweden). The energy discourse will be monitored using the so-called Discourse-Historical Approach. We argue that the energy discourse of the European institutions (namely the European Commission and the European Parliament) has an impact on the energy discourse on the Member States and thus leads to fundamental changes in their view of energy.

The main researcher is Lukáš Tichý from the Institute of International Relations. The members of the research team for FIR VŠE are Zbyněk Dubský, Markéta Votoupalová and Alžběta Vítková.