Bachelor student International Econometrics and Operations Research Hai Minh Tran won the Netspar Bsc Thesis Award sponsored by the UWV Pension Fund. His thesis 'Is good health purchaseable by out-of-pocket money in Western Europe? Evidence from SHARE' was supervised by Professor Robin Lumsdaine from the American University.Â
Alongside Hai Minh Tran, Christian Bockweg won the MSc Thesis Award for his thesis "Framing and pension annuities: Experimental evidence from a Dutch Pension Fund.
Christian Bockweg was supervised by Onno Steenbeek, professor of Pension Fund Risk Management from Erasmus School of Economics.Â
The jury judges the work of Hai Minh Tran as follows: One of the key issues in the Dutch pension debate is whether pensions should be made more flexible to tailor the particular needs of the insured members. Health is one of the needs people tend to value very highly. Therefore, it is very relevant to see if people nowadays could buy health with more money. A laborious analysis on the data sets from SHARE can give insight into this issue. But handling a huge database also requires substantial skills in econometrics. In the bachelor thesis Hai Minh Tran shows these skills. The answer from the analysis is that for most countries good health does not seem purchasable by out-of-pocket-money. The quality and relevance of the thesis make Hai Minh Tran a worthy winner of the UWV Bachelor’s thesis award.
- More information
Click here for the  Jury report of Netspar
Click here to read the winning theses.Â