The CERGE-EI Foundation is an American supporting organization for CERGE-EI, a graduate school in the Czech Republic that is a joint venture between Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Besides supporting CERGE-EI, the foundation also has teaching fellowships in economics at universities in Central and Eastern Europe and countries formerly part of the Soviet Union and supports a study abroad program for American students at Charles University.

CERGE-EI

In 1991, Charles University in the Czech Republic created the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education as a graduate school offering doctorates in economics with courses taught in English. In 1992, the Czech Academy of Sciences created the Economics Institute to produce economic analyses. The two organizations agreed to cooperate in 1993 and combined as a joint venture between Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1999. ¹

Graduate Teaching Fellows

The CERGE-EI Foundation’s primary activity is supporting the CERGE-EI school. The foundation also supports teaching fellowships in 28 countries in Central and Southern Europe and countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. The foundation says that “education in economics is one of the least reformed areas in the post-Communist world” and that since the program’s inception in 2007, graduate teaching fellows have taught 167,000 students in 180 colleges and universities. ²

Undergraduate Program in Central European Studies

The CERGE-EI Foundation supports grants for the Undergraduate Program in Central European Studies (UPCES) at Charles University.  The UPCES program is a study abroad program enabling undergraduates to spend a semester at Charles University designed to teach students about the Czech Republic, including opportunities for interacting with Czech families and organized trips to other cities in the Czech Republic and Poland. The program has, since 2002, hosted 2,500 students from 60 universities in the U.S. and Canada. ³

Notable Scholars

Stepan Jurajda

Stepan Jurajda is a professor at CERGE-EI and deputy minister for science, research, and innovation in the Czech Republic. ⁴ In the 1980s, while a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, he conducted research with Stephen Flannery that concluded that workers in that city usually obtained jobs quickly when their unemployment ran out. ⁵

Since 1998, in collaboration with Orley Ashenfelter of Princeton, he developed a “Big Mac Index” that compares prices of a Big Mac in different countries as a way of making cross-country wage comparisons. In 2021 Ashenfelter and Jurajda found that McDonald’s restaurants were more likely to pass on the costs of minimum wage increases by raising Big Mac prices. ⁶

Nikolas Mittag

Nikolas Mittag is an associate professor at CERGE-EI. ⁷ In 2015 he published a paper with Bruce Meyer of the University of Chicago that found that the Census Bureau substantially underestimated the income of poor Americans by understating the amount of aid these Americans received.  Meyer and Mittag determined that in New York State, the Census Bureau measure did not count 40 percent of the aid from food stamps and 60 percent of welfare aid received through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. They concluded that the Census Bureau “greatly understates the effects of anti-poverty programs.” ⁸

Donors

Among the organizations that have donated between $100,000 and $499,999 to CERGE-EI are the Ford, Andrew W. Mellon, John S. and Cynthia Reed, Brinson, Soros, and State Street Foundations; the Pew Charitable Trusts; the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the World Bank. ⁹

1. ^[1] “CERGE-EI, “Report On Activities For The Meeting Of Heads Of National Economic Research Organizations, Organization for Economic Research and Development, 2005, https://www.oecd.org/czech/34955425.pdf  (accessed August 15, 2022)
2. “Teaching Fellows,” https://www.cerge-ei-foundation.org/teaching-fellows (accessed August 15, 2022)
3.  “UPCES:  Who We Are,” https://upces.cerge-ei.cz/about/who-we-are (accessed August 15, 2022)
4. “Stepan Jurajda,” https://www.cerge-ei.cz/people/stepan-jurajda (accessed August 15, 2022).
5. Amity Shlaes. “Job Hunters Slack Off When Given A Helping Hand,” Bloomberg column in Wilmington News Journal, April 13, 2010.
6. ^[1] Orley Ashenfelter and Stepan Jurajda, “Wages, Minimum Wages, and Pass Through:  The Case of McDonald’s Restaurants,” https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/28506.html (accessed August 15, 2022)
7. “Nikolas Mittag,” https://www.cerge-ei.cz/people/nikolas-mittag (accessed August 15, 2022).
8. Robert Doar, “Mismeasuring Poverty,” Wall Steet Journal, November 29, 2015.
9. “CERGE-EI:  Donors,” https://www.cerge-ei.cz/about/donors (accessed August 15, 2022)