About our research team FinAct
The FinAct research team is centered around core faculty members of the Department of Accounting and Finance, Faculty of Business and Economics at Mendel University, Brno. Originally started as FinHub, in early 2024, during the departments’ merger, the research team expanded its research activities, covering various fields of Accounting, Business, Finance, and their interactions.
University support covers various valuable data sources including Amadeus and Orbis databases, Morningstar, and Bloomberg. During the academic year, we provide several special seminars and webinars, open to the general public. If you want to participate or if you are interested in becoming a member of the FinAct group, please contact us.
Below you can find the most recent research topics of the FinAct, including the calendar of research conferences held at Mendel University. We are looking forward to seeing you at our events, both virtual and held in person on our wonderful campus!
Jan Hanousek and Jolana Stejskalova,
Coordinators of the FinAct research group
What is the purpose?
The team aims to guide young faculty and Ph.D. students across Mendel University and cooperating institutions. While we do not restrict our research orientation, we focus primarily on four key areas:
- Accounting & Corporate Finance
- Behavioral Finance and Behavioral Economics
- Asset Pricing and Portfolio Optimization
- Banking, regulation, and policies
Research topics
Our team provides comprehensive research on various economic fields. Our key research areas are following:
1. Accounting & Corporate Finance
- Ownership structure and critical corporate decisions
- Business groups, transfer pricing, profit shifting, tunneling, and propping
- Classical corporate finance topics linked with accounting
- Financial distress evolution
- Company announcements and interactions with social media
- ESG
2. Behavioural Finance and Behavioural Economics
- Regulation and protection of retail investors
- Gambling addiction, trading frenzies
- Trading and regulation based on asymmetries, signaling
3. Asset Pricing and Portfolio Optimization
- Market interconnectedness
- Market frictions, anomalies
- Forecasting
4. Banking, regulation, policies
- Monetary policy, inflation
- Banking regulation, debt
- Uncertainty & investment activity
We use number of data resources, especially:
- databases: Orbis, Amadeus, Bankscope, Morningstar, Bloomberg,
- others: Google Trends, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
In such widespread research area, we work with several statistical softwares. High-performance analyses are calculated by Matlab. A part of important contribution provides software STATA. Moreover, our team processes the information in Python for example to automatically download Google Trends data.