She didn’t come out on top, but alumna Esmée Zwiers (Princeton University, United States) did receive an honorable mention from the jury during the 2020 KVS Medal award ceremony for best PhD thesis, defended in the field of economics at a Dutch university in the past three years.
According to the jury, Esmée wrote a very nice thesis, in which she studies how three different childhood factors influence the child's human capital formation, and focuses on the role of family in fate. The KVS Medal was won by Jurre Tiel, currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He won the medal for his PhD thesis entitled ‘Competition, dynamic pricing and advice in frictional markets: Theory and evidence from the Dutch market for mortgages', defended on January 14, 2020 at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
The KVS medal is awarded every three years for the best PhD thesis in the economic sciences, defended at a university in the Netherlands. The winner of the KVS medal also receives a financial award. The Royal Dutch Economic Association (‘Koninklijke Vereniging voor Staathuishoudkunde’) award the KVS Penning since 1999.
About Esmée Zwiers
Esmée Zwiers finished her MSc in Economics and Business Economics (specialisation: Policy Economics) at Erasmus School of Economics in 2015. After obtaining her Master, she started a PhD at the Tinbergen Institute. As an applied microeconomist, Esmée works primarily in the fields of family economics, labor economics, and health economics. In her latest work, she studies how changes in the costs of having children affect fertility decisions, and how these in turn affect the child's long-term outcomes.