News

People of CERGE-EI: Meet Our Alumni

29 June, 2021

Krešimir Žigić, Citigroup Endowment Associate Professor with Tenure at CERGE-EI and a Ph.D. graduate from 1996, studied in the first CERGE-EI cohort. How does he remember the atmosphere of the first years of our institution? Why did he choose a career in academia? We asked Krešo several questions for our blog interview.

“CERGE-EI has grown into a very respectable economics department and is recognized worldwide for very strong theory and also macro groups which are at the frontiers of research in their respective fields, and the people from both groups publish in the very top economic journals and earn the most prestigious ERC grants,” said Krešmir Žigić.

Krešimir Žigić represents the fourth generation of teachers in his family. “Both of my parents were high school professors, and my sister is one of the best chemistry teachers in Croatia. My fraternal grandmother was a teacher, and her uncle was a teacher and the director of the elementary school in a small city in Croatia at the turn of the 20th century. (…) On top of that, I enjoy reading and learning about new research in economic theory and applied microeconomics, and I am eager to apply some of these concepts in my own research.”

Krešimir Žigić has been the Citigroup Endowment Associate Professor with Tenure at CERGE-EI since 2007 and a member of the Executive and Supervisory Committee of CERGE-EI since 2004. He has also been a Docent (Associate Professor) at CERGE, Charles University (previously an Assistant Professor since 1996), and a Senior Researcher at the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (previously a Researcher). He served as Deputy Director for Graduate Studies at CERGE and EI between the years 1997–1999, 2005–2008, and 2015–2017. Krešimir graduated from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Zagreb and received his Ph.D. in Economics at CERGE-EI. 

Read the full interview here.