Zuzana Fungáčová
Zuzana Fungáčová is Senior Adviser at the Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT), where she leads research activities and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the BOFIT Discussion Paper Series. Her work focuses on empirical banking, emerging markets and their financial sectors as well as political economy of banking. She has published extensively in leading international journals, including the Journal of Comparative Economics, International Journal of Central Banking, Journal of Financial Stability, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Financial Services Research, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, World Development, Economics of Transition, China Economic Review and contributed chapters to the Oxford Handbook of Banking. Dr. Fungáčová earned her Ph.D. in Economics from CERGE-EI in Prague and has held visiting positions at the European Central Bank, Austrian National Bank, and University of Pennsylvania. She is currently President of the Slovak Economic Association and actively participates in international research networks and policy discussions. Her recent projects explore topics related to geopolitical risk, monetary policy transmission, and the interplay between politics and banking.
Dr. Fungáčová will give a lecture entitled Northern Insights: Geopolitical Risk from Finnish News Media.
Geopolitical risk has become a persistent feature of the global economic environment. Wars, rising military tensions, and acts of terrorism increasingly shape expectations in financial markets and influence the behaviour of firms and households. Yet despite this growing importance, much of what we know about geopolitical risk is filtered through a narrow informational lens. Widely used measures rely on English-language media with global reach, potentially failing to sufficiently capture how risks are perceived everywhere. For small, open economies with distinctive histories and languages, this limitation may be particularly acute. We construct a geopolitical risk indicator for Finland using local, Finnish language news media – FinnGPR. We compare FinnGPR to global and country-specific measures of geopolitical risk derived from Anglo-Saxon media. We show that in the case of Finland, local geopolitical risk perceptions based on local news media differ from global attention on geopolitical risk in Finland as reflected in the global media. We study the effects of FinnGPR on the Finnish economy and find that the Finnish economy tends to be resilient to geopolitical risk shocks. Nevertheless, we find that geopolitical risks can represent a threat to Finnish financial market stability.
Tomáš Jagelka
https://sites.google.com/view/tomasjagelka/home
Tomáš Jagelka is an Associate Professor at the University of Bonn and a recurrent visitor to the economics department at Dartmouth College. His current research, supported by the ERC Starting Grant FELICITAS, focuses on advancing our understanding of preferences, skills, and other personal attributes, which are fundamental drivers of success in various life domains. His research has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Political Economy and recognized by the French Economic Association (Best PhD in economics in France, 2019), International Association for Applied Econometrics (Best paper presented by a PhD student, 2019), and the Slovak Economic Association (Best paper authored by economist up to 35 years of age, 2020) and most recently by the 14th annual Exeter Prize awarded to the most outstanding article published in a refereed journal in the previous calendar year from the following fields: experimental economics, decision theory and behavioral economics.
Dr. Jagelka will give a lecture entitled Understanding People’s Preferences (Valuations) for Essential Life Attributes.
Preferences, skills, and other latent personal attributes (PSAs) are key drivers of a myriad of decisions which combine to create an individual’s life story. However, unobserved PSAs are only noisily revealed by observed behavior. I demonstrate that an innovative discrete choice framework, in which respondents choose between pairs of realistic life stories, can be used to provide causal estimates of distributions in preferences (valuations) for policy-relevant life outcomes (longevity, health, family structure) in the United States and in Europe. I link the estimated heterogeneity to culture, demographics, and other PSAs. In addition, LLMs may be prompted to provide complementary signals on people’s preferences for essential life attributes even if data for human respondents is available.