Anglo-American University in Prague GACR Recognizes AAU Research with Two Grants
AAU has been awarded two grants from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (GACR) for the projects: Moral Authority of the State: Trust, Market, Consent and Separating P-hacking from Publication Bias in Financial Research.
President Jiří Schwarz said the grants represent validation by a prestigious institution of the valuable work done by AAU researchers.
“The fact that the scientific research potential of a private university has been publicly recognised by the authority of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic is already a great success,” said Schwarz. “We appreciate that with this decision we have been matched with top Czech scientific institutes and public universities, to which grants for basic scientific research are traditionally directed in the Czech Republic.”
Moral Authority of the State is headed by Silviya Lechner, Chair of the Department of Political Science and Senior Lecturer for the School of International Relations & Diplomacy, and is intended to enter the discourse on the authority of the state as an issue that shapes the political philosophy of liberalism. Blending the classical contractualist arguments of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant with the contemporary interventions of Thomas Nagel, Arthur Ripstein, and AJ Simmons, Lechner’s research aims to re-examine the moral foundations of state authority (such as trust, consent, commitment) and to distinguish the notion of the state as a “civic association” (Oakeshott 1975) from alternative, voluntarist conceptions.
Separating P-hacking from Publication Bias in Financial Research is led by the Institute of Economic Studies at Charles University with the aid of AAU researchers Zuzana Havránková, Distinguished Senior Lecturer for the School of Business Administration, and Jiří Schwarz Jr., Dean of the School of Business Administration. The project is aimed at developing procedures to distinguish “p-hacking”, i.e. data manipulation, from publication bias in meta-analysis, which will then be used to measure the impact of these issues in literature on important financial topics.
The findings will likewise help researchers to understand the root causes of the replication crisis and use: meta-regression analysis to measure the true strength of financial phenomena, investors to assess the sensitivity of investments to systematic risk, and regulators to find the optimal way to regulate financial markets and institutions.
Both projects are part of AAU’s scientific research strategy, which aims to create a high-quality research environment in keeping with the standards of distinguished private universities found in other countries.