Tomáš Haufer
Master’s student in Economic Research
CERGE-EI, Prague
I hold a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Prague University of Economics and Business, where I graduated in the top 10% of my cohort and spent a term at the University of Agder in Norway on Erasmus. Before CERGE-EI I interned at Moody’s Analytics in Prague, writing for the Economic View series and working on Economic Scenarios for Climate Risk in the Global Macroeconomic Model. Since June 2026 I have been a research assistant to Clara Sievert at CERGE-EI, analysing a field RCT on religion and development in the DRC and working on early-stage projects in Dutch and Czech economic history.
Research interests
Economic History · Institutional and Political Economy · Applied Economics
So far that has mostly meant building datasets out of sources that were not gathered for research — army service records, internal refereeing reports, a corpus of digitised books — and then working out what they can and cannot answer. Alongside the research I write Diary of an Econ Student, and I serve as Secretary of FBC Trutnov and on a Regional Referee Committee in Czech Floorball.
Current research
The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldiers
Loyalty, desertion, and the Czechoslovak Legions, 1914–1920.
Wartime desertion is usually studied in conscript armies, where staying may reflect fear rather than loyalty. The Legions were a volunteer force, formed from emigrants, prisoners of war, and men who had already deserted the Habsburg army — so the same individuals can be watched choosing twice, under different incentives. The question is why men who had already chosen the nation once would leave its army again, and whether nationalism in their home areas before the war kept them loyal. Because enlistment was voluntary, the setting strips out much of the coercion confound and gets closer to what actually sustained commitment.
-
Records
~320,000 individual soldier records across two datasets, not previously used in economic research: 132,993 legionnaires and 186,192 fallen Habsburg soldiers
-
Nationalism
Measured place by place Czech amateur theatre in 7,368 places, 1780–1913, and 11,128 entries in the member lists of the Matice česká and the Matice moravská, digitised from scans the 1910 register of every settlement, with its schools and other institutions, read by language models and checked against hand transcription
-
Geography
350 districts 158 political districts in Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia, and 192 district-level units across 23 counties of Upper Hungary 1910 censuses of both halves of the monarchy, joined to birthplaces through settlement crosswalks
-
Status
In progress Master’s thesis Paper in preparation supervised by Sebastian Ottinger · data construction done and checked, analysis next
Nationalism, the Legion and desertion, by district
Czech lands, 148 census districts of 1910
Each view has its own scale, up to the 97th percentile. Definitions are provisional. Court districts, settlements and the per-Czech-speaker view.
Selected work
-
The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldiers: Loyalty, Desertion, and the Czechoslovak Legions
Master’s thesis, CERGE-EI · in progress -
What Drives the Referees’ Performance? The Effect of Referee Coaches on Referees’ Performance
Statistics term project, CERGE-EI, 2026 -
Written in Time: Unsupervised Discovery of Emotional and Stylistic Structure in the Project Gutenberg Corpus
Machine Learning for Social Scientists, CERGE-EI, 2026 -
Central and Eastern Europe Outlook: United in Diversity
Moody’s Analytics, 2025
Background
Training and toolkit
Education
-
2025–2027
MA, Economic Research CERGE-EI, Prague
-
2022–2025
BA, Economics Prague University of Economics and Business · top 10% of the cohort
-
2024
Erasmus exchange University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
Research experience
-
2026
Research Assistant to Clara Sievert CERGE-EI, Prague · full-time June to September, part-time October to December Data analysis of a field RCT on religion and development in the DRC, and early-stage projects in Dutch and Czech economic history.
-
2025
Economic Analysis Summer Intern Moody’s Analytics, Prague · full-time, June to August Country outlooks for the Economic View series, Economic Scenarios for Climate Risk, and exchange-rate equations in the Global Macroeconomic Model.
Methods and data
-
Toolkit
Panel data and fixed effects, instrumental variables and GMM, time series, unsupervised learning on text · archival record linkage, historical census crosswalks, corpus construction · LLM-assisted data extraction from printed sources, checked against hand transcription
