Jan Švejnar

Jan Švejnar is an economist who was born in Prague and works at Columbia University in New York as a professor of global economics and the director of the Center for Global Economic Governance (CGEG). He is a co-founder of the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education of Charles University (CERGE), which later became part of CERGE-EI, a joint workplace of Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (EI), where he chairs the Executive and Supervisory Committee. Within the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, which he founded, he heads the IDEA think tank. He has been studying microeconomics, labor economics and global economic development for a long time. His current research on the impact of billionaires on economic growth is generating lively debate in academic and popular circles. He worked as an economic adviser to President Václav Havel, and in 2008 he was one of the two candidates for the presidency of the Czech Republic. He studied economics at Cornell University and Princeton University. He is a laureate of the IZA prize in the field of labor economics (2015) and the Neuron prize for contribution to world science (2012).