Masaryk University Economic Seminars

Our cleantech startup strategy research examines how cleantech start-ups cope with resource constraints while pursuing both economic and environmental objectives. We focus on how firms can achieve balanced growth without mission drift. Building on bricolage theory, we conceptualize firms’ responses as configurations of hybrid harvesting strategies, including partnerships, networking, local resource utilisation, customer empowerment, and inclusive employment. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) on data from a questionnaire survey and qualitative interviews with cleantech start-ups, we explore how different strategy configurations perform under varying resource constraints. The research is conducted within the project “Resilience and impact of clean-tech start-ups in Bavaria and the Czech Republic” in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich. Preliminary findings suggest multiple pathways to balanced growth, but also configurations associated with mission drift, indicating that outcomes depend on both strategy combinations and the context in which they are applied.

This lecture examines pharmaceutical regulation and the incentives for innovation from an international perspective, highlighting the public good nature of health care innovation and its cross-border diffusion. It summarizes empirical evidence on how push and pull incentives shape R&D investment, innovation, and global access. It emphasizes the role of strategic interdependencies and spillovers, including free riding in R&D financing, learning-by-doing effects, drug shortages, reference pricing, and parallel trade. We then provide new evidence on the international spillovers of pull incentives on innovation showing that international cooperation and innovative institutions are necessary to better align national regulations with the global objective of sustaining pharmaceutical innovation.

Before the lecture, there will be small refreshments at 4:00 pm. During this time, you can discuss with each other and meet the speaker.

When financial markets become turbulent, how do investors price the fear of uncertainty itself? Does that fear spread across different corners of the global economy? This research investigates the Variance Risk Premium (VRP), defined as the gap between what investors expect volatility to be and what it actually turns out to be, across five distinct asset classes: equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, cryptocurrencies, and commodities. While VRP has been studied extensively in stock markets, its behaviour in bond markets, currency markets, commodity markets, and the rapidly growing cryptocurrency space remains poorly understood — particularly in a unified, comparative framework.
Using intraday and high-frequency data spanning 2018–2025 — a period capturing COVID-19, the 2022 rate hiking cycle, and multiple crypto boom-bust episodes — the research employs advanced econometric models including GARCH, HAR, VAR, VECM, and Dynamic Conditional Correlation to examine how VRP behaves, what drives it, and whether volatility risk in one market spills over into others.