During the Student Research Conference (SRC) at Radboud University Nijmegen econometrics students of Erasmus School of Economics Sebastiaan Snijders and Fernando Lasso have won the Public Award for their research paper on the predictive power of Google Search data on the unemployment rate in Brazil. Snijders and Lasso initially wrote their paper for the Bachelor Honours Class of Erasmus School of Economics under supervision of Dean Prof. Philip Hans Franses.
The SRC board selected the paper as one of the eight workshop presentations at the conference. On 30 November 2016, during the award ceremony, the audience received a vote on the most socially relevant research after a two minute pitch by the top three presentations. With 39% of the votes, Sebastiaan and Fernando received a slightly higher favourability than the two other top ranked pitches on the topics of the gender gap in the Netherlands and the social taboo on schizophrenia and brought home the public award in their category.
About the Student Research Conference
The annual SRC in the Netherlands gives bachelor students of Dutch and Flemish universities (of applied sciences) of all disciplines the opportunity to present their research at an academic conference. The SRC is a contest exclusively for undergraduate research and follows common academic practice. The initiative for the SRC comes from the Association of Dutch Universities, University College Roosevelt and the University of Maastricht.