FSV UK project succeeds in the Primus competition, bringing German economist to the faculty

One project from FSV UK succeeded in the 11th round of the Primus university competition, which Charles University has been announcing since 2017.

The successful applicant is German economist Jakob Miethe, currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU). Thanks to the Primus grant, he will join the Institute of Economic Studies (IES) at FSV UK, where he will lead the project International Ownership Structures. He will collaborate with IES researchers Miroslav Palanský, Jaromír Baxa, and Jan Žalman.

The project addresses growing geopolitical challenges ranging from Russian influence via unilateral U.S. actions to growing Chinese state-owned enterprise presence. Researchers should inform policymakers about these trends and the success of political responses to them. However, opaque international ownership structures undermine such efforts as international financial statistics fail to capture international integration.

The proposed project creates tools to track international ownership networks. It combines European corporate registers and develops algorithms to establish international chains of legal ownership for any corporate endpoint in Europe. Moving up the indirect ownership chain country by country, these chains are aggregated into a new type of international financial statistic: “Foreign Corporate Accounts” or FCAs. These can flexibly record international integration both at the country level and at the level of a company. They will be used to produce ambitious research papers combining causal and novel descriptive evidence.

Since 2017, Charles University has been announcing the Primus competition, designed for young promising scientists, especially those who are returning to Charles University after a long-term internship abroad or who have not yet worked at the University. The aim of the programme is to support top researchers in establishing and developing new research groups and laboratories.

One of the long-term objectives, which is being met, is also to increase the University’s success in obtaining international grants (e.g. European Research Council – ERC grants). It is therefore expected that successful proposers will establish their own laboratories/research lines at Charles University and will be able to apply for ERC grants by the end of the Primus project.

Many congratulations!