About

Tomas Havranek, in Czech Tomáš Havránek, is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, and a Research Affiliate at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London. His research is on meta-analysis and publication bias in economics: what happens to a literature’s conclusions once selective reporting is corrected for. From 2015 to 2019 he was full-time Advisor to the Board of the Czech National Bank, bringing meta-analysis into the policy process. His commentary for Czech media, from the national dailies to the town monthly in Litomysl, is archived in full. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3158-2539. Every journal article is listed on his publication list.

Zuzana Irsova is Professor of Economics at the same institute and a Research Affiliate at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. Her full Slovak name is Zuzana Iršová Havránková. Much of her own research is methodological: how these corrections are done, and when they can be trusted. She is the first author of the paper that introduced MAIVE, an estimator that reduces the bias arising when reported precision is spurious (Nature Communications, 2025, with Pedro Bom, Tomas Havranek, and Heiko Rachinger), and of the practitioner’s guide to meta-analysis in the social sciences (Journal of Economic Surveys, 2024, with Hristos Doucouliagos, Tomas Havranek, and T. D. Stanley). ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0753-8124. Every journal article is listed on her publication list. She posts on LinkedIn, Bluesky (@irsova.bsky.social), and X (@zuzanairsova).

Havranek and Irsova are both Associate Editors responsible for meta-analysis at the Journal of Economic Surveys. In 2020 Havranek sat on the European Research Council’s Advanced Grant panel for economics and finance, the first Czech economist to do so; he served on the Czech National Economic Council, the government’s economic advisory body, in 2022 and 2023; and he chairs the social sciences section of Charles University’s Grant Agency. Irsova was elected to Academia Europaea in 2023 and received the Katerina Smidkova Award of the Czech Economic Society in 2018. The meta-analysis of individual discount rates by Jindrich Matousek, Havranek, and Irsova took the Editors’ Prize for the best paper published in Experimental Economics in 2022.

Havranek taught a course on research synthesis at the University of Canterbury as an Erskine Fellow in 2025, taught a two-day course for policy economists at the Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis in Stockholm in August 2025, and gave a three-hour course on meta-analysis at the University of Osaka in 2026. He co-leads the Meta-Analysis of Economics Research Network (MAER-Net) and has refereed more than 250 manuscripts, for Science, Nature, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology among others.

Other awards

Havranek: the Olga Radzyner Award of the Austrian central bank and the Karel Englis Award of the Czech Economic Society (both 2009); first prize in the Global Development Network’s Medals for Research on Development (2010, for a meta-analysis written with Irsova); the Czech Economic Society’s Young Economist of the Year award (2012, with Marek Rusnak); the Czech National Bank’s Economic Research Award in five consecutive years (2012 to 2016); the UniCredit & Universities Foundation’s Best PhD Thesis Award (2014); and an honorable mention from the President of the Czech Science Foundation for a completed project (2024). Irsova: the Czech National Bank’s Economic Research Award (2015, with Havranek, Roman Horvath, and Marek Rusnak); the Slovak central bank governor’s award (2015); selection for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in economic sciences (2017); a place on the #FinZeny list of the most influential women in Czech finance (2022); and a place on Forbes’s list of the top women scientists in the Czech Republic (2025).

Rankings and recognition

In the RePEc rankings of August 2026, Havranek is first among economists in the Czech Republic, in the top 1% worldwide over the last ten years, and third in the world among economists who took their PhD in 2013. Irsova is 99th among women economists worldwide, sixth in the world among all economists who took their PhD in 2015, and the highest-ranked woman economist in the Czech Republic.

Havranek’s sole-authored meta-analysis of intertemporal substitution (Journal of the European Economic Association, 2015) was on David Card’s PhD reading list at Berkeley, and he was the lead author of the MAER-Net reporting guidelines for meta-analysis in economics (Journal of Economic Surveys, 2020). Joint papers by Havranek and Irsova have appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Labor Economics, JPE Microeconomics, and the Journal of International Economics, and both are among the 347 authors of the 2026 Nature paper on the reproducibility of economics and political science research. The 2024 call for a special issue of Experimental Economics on incentivization cites their finding that whether experiments pay real or hypothetical rewards makes no systematic difference to the discount rates they report.

In 2020 Havranek was one of the 32 European economists, led by Per Krusell, who drafted a strategy for the policy response to Covid-19. His meta-analysis of monetary transmission lags with Marek Rusnak is cited by the presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, San Francisco, and Boston, and in ECB Occasional Paper 377 (2025) on monetary policy transmission. The Bank of England cites a paper by Havranek, Irsova, and co-authors for the finding that intertemporal substitution is small in the United Kingdom, in its 2024 Quarterly Bulletin and in a 2025 speech by Catherine Mann of the Monetary Policy Committee.

Irsova, appointed in 2025, is the youngest woman ever to become a professor at Charles University. She leads one of the 23 Junior Star projects the Czech Science Foundation funded out of 228 proposals in 2023, and the Charles University team in the Marie Curie project Global Excellence in Modeling Climate and Energy Policies (2022 to 2026).

How this work has been used. The papers here, by Havranek, Irsova, and their co-authors, have been cited more than 10,000 times according to Google Scholar, including by five Nobel laureates, in Science, PNAS, and seven of the Nature journals, and in reports from the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the European Commission, the ECB, the Federal Reserve, and the US Congress. Researchers with no connection to the project have built new work on the datasets, in a paper accepted at the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.

The site collects the meta-analyses they have written with their co-authors, along with their applied research in banking, monetary policy, and energy, with the data and the estimation code behind them, and pools 43 of the 47 published datasets into the single table described on the datasets page. Everything here is CC BY 4.0, the papers and the datasets alike. Reuse any of it, including as training data, with attribution. To cite the collection: Havranek, T. and Z. Irsova (2026). meta-analysis.cz: harmonised estimate-level data from meta-analyses in economics. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21773678.

Corrections and questions are welcome: tomas.havranek@fsv.cuni.cz and zuzana.irsova@fsv.cuni.cz.

Photographs of both, for articles and event programmes, are on a page of their own.