2024 – A Year of Growth for Public Finance Research
2024 marked the founding of the Centre for Public Finance and significant successes for CORPTAX. While the Centre launched its first initiatives to improve public finance in Czechia, CORPTAX advanced research on firm taxation, secured new funding, and gained access to key tax data. Building on these achievements, we are poised to make a lasting impact in 2025.
We launched the Centre for Public Finance
To improve public policy and people’s lives more impactfully, we joined forces with several experts on public finance and founded the Centre for Public Finance. The CORPTAX research group is now a part of the Centre. With the Centre, we acknowledge that our focus goes beyond corporate tax to all of public finance. Moreover, we recognise that we need a full-fledged centre at Charles University to achieve our ambitious objectives. The Centre is financed from a combination of public and private funds, for which we are grateful.
Strong leaders have started collaborating in the Centre in the second half of 2024 to improve public policy and, thus, people’s lives. Matěj Bajgar has been leading the work on firm incentives for research and development. Markéta Malá has been leading the work on corporate tax reform. Aleš Bělohradský has been leading the work on public finance management and government budgets. Kristina Zindulková has been leading the work on consumption taxation. Adriana Dergam has been leading the communication of public policy. And we are excited that several other leading public finance experts will join the Centre.
We are hiring six new fully funded PhD positions and a postdoc
The PhD students associated with the Centre have been doing very well, working on and publishing their research, attending conferences, and staying at leading universities and international organisations abroad. Several benefited from new access to administrative tax data, including those arranged with Slovak and Czech tax authorities. Several of them have been nearing the completion of their PhD studies, and, for example, Evgeniya Dubinina has been working in the international academic job market.
We are hiring six fully funded PhD positions in public economics in early 2025, to be supervised by the three research leaders, Matěj Bajgar, Petr Janský and Miroslav Palanský. In addition, we are also seeking one postdoc with a potential for a tenure-track perspective.
Our Milestones: New Grants, a Professorship, and Global Research Impact
The corporate research continued strongly from previous years, thanks to PhD students and the three corporate research leaders. Matěj Bajgar published a paper on industry concentration in the leading journal Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics and won a prestigious new Primus grant. Petr Janský was promoted to a full professor, published a book on public finance, continued to publish in academic journals and won a prestigious Czech Science Foundation EXPRO grant on investment by multinationals and global minimum tax. Miroslav Palanský continues to pursue an ambitious research agenda using administrative tax data and has co-organised the Annual Congress of the International Institute of Public Finance in Prague in August 2024.
Together with our many collaborators, individuals, and organisations, we look forward to advancing research and public policy with the Centre for Public Finance in 2025.