Impact
Short bio
Zuzana Irsova is Professor of Economics at Charles University in Prague. She works in meta-research, bringing together estimates from many studies to examine publication bias and the reliability of empirical evidence, with applications in labor and international economics. She is an elected member of Academia Europaea, a Research Affiliate at Stanford METRICS and Associate Editor for meta-analysis at the Journal of Economic Surveys. She co-maintains meta-analysis.cz. On RePEc she ranks in the top 1% of women economists worldwide, and in 2025 Forbes listed her among the Top Women Scientists in Czechia. Born in Roznava, Slovakia, she lives in Litomysl, Bohemia.
Recognition
Google Scholar: 5,005 citations, h-index 28 (16 October 2026).
According to RePEc (September 2026), she is the highest-ranked woman economist in the Czech Republic and seventh in the world among economists who received their PhD in 2015. For publications in the last 10 years, she ranks fourth among all economists in the Czech Republic, 101st among women economists worldwide and in the top 1.4% worldwide (1,007th of 74,391 registered authors).
- 2025
- Top Women Scientists in Czechia, Forbes Czechia. Source
- 2024
- Editors’ Prize for the best paper published in Experimental Economics in 2022, Economic Science Association. Shared with Jindrich Matousek and Tomas Havranek. Source
- 2023
- Elected member of Academia Europaea. Source
- 2022
- Named on the #FinZeny list of the most influential women in Czech finance. Source
- 2018
- Katerina Smidkova Award of the Czech Economic Society, for female economists with exceptionally high-quality publications. Source
- 2017
- Selected for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in economic sciences. Source
- 2015
- Economic Research Award of the Czech National Bank, for work on cross-country differences in intertemporal substitution. Shared with Tomas Havranek, Roman Horvath and Marek Rusnak. Source
- 2015
- Governor’s Award of the National Bank of Slovakia, first place, for a dissertation relevant to monetary policy and financial stability. Source
- 2013
- Minister of Education’s Prize for outstanding students and graduates, Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. Source
- 2010
- Medal for Research on Development, first place, Global Development Network. Shared with Tomas Havranek. Source
Who uses the research
Three Nobel laureates draw on her work: Thomas Sargent uses her results on intertemporal substitution in Dynamic Programming, Simon Johnson builds on the same results, and Joseph Stiglitz cites her work on capital-labor substitution.
Charles Jones and Christopher Tonetti take her estimate of capital-labor substitution as the upper bound in Past Automation and Future A.I.
The US Environmental Protection Agency calibrates the intertemporal substitution parameter of SAGE, the model it uses to analyse regulation, from her cross-country meta-analysis.
Her work on foreign direct investment is used by the World Bank, IMF, OECD, UNCTAD, WTO and the Inter-American Development Bank.
Her work on daylight saving time is cited in every version of the Congressional Research Service report since 2018, by the European Parliamentary Research Service and the UK House of Commons Library. Spain also drew on it in the note it put to the Council of the European Union in 2025 on ending seasonal clock changes.
Her work on gasoline demand, trade, the social cost of carbon and water demand is cited in Science, PNAS and Nature Water.
Others build on her data: David Slichter and Nhan Tran use eleven of her datasets in a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics.
Roles
- Professor of Economics, Charles University (since 2025). Source
- Distinguished Senior Lecturer, Anglo-American University (since 2022). Source
- Research Affiliate, METRICS, the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (since May 2025). Source
- Associate Editor for meta-analysis, Journal of Economic Surveys (since January 2024). Source
- Principal investigator of the Junior Star project METASPUR, Czech Science Foundation (2023–2027). Source
- Co-maintainer, meta-analysis.cz and EasyMeta.org. Source
From 2017 to 2022 she ran the Czech election poll aggregator KdoVyhrajeVolby.cz. Interview in Hospodarske noviny