Yasmine van der Straten and team members Andrea Pogliano and Antonia Kurz, have won the fifth edition of the National Economics Olympiad. The online event, organised by study association AEclipse, took place on Friday 5 March 2021 and attracted participants from all over the Netherlands, competing for the title ‘best economics students of the Netherlands’.
Tackling ten compelling questions in three hours
Yasmine, who enrolled in the Research Master programme of Tinbergen Institute in 2019, fellow MPhil student Antonia (Tinbergen Institute) and Andrea, a European Master student in Health Economics and Management (EU-HEM), had to compete against ten other teams. The problem set that each team had to tackle consisted of ten compelling academic questions, created by professors from various Dutch institutions and encompassing topics related to a variety of branches in economics. There were questions on Macroeconomics, Behavioural Economics, Health Economics, Game Theory, Industrial Organisation and Finance. Both the amount of questions and their complexity required the teams to divide tasks among team members.
Yasmine van der Straten, who obtained bachelor’s degrees in both Economics and Law in Rotterdam, says: ‘Due to the diversity of our interests, Antonia, Andrea and I could divide tasks quickly and get started. However, even though we divided the questions accordingly, we still asked each other something or discussed a question every now and then.’
Keynote by Professor Rick van der Ploeg
After 3 hours of blood, sweat and tears, the participants in the Olympiad, as well as other interested students, had the opportunity to listen to this year's keynote lecture on "Green Recovery after the Pandemic", by Rick van der Ploeg, Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. Professor Van der Ploeg highlighted the importance of immediate action to prevent further damage to our climate system and discussed the economic and political challenges of the green transition.
About AEclipse and the National Economics Olympiad
AEclipse is the study association for students in the master’s programmes International Economics, Policy Economics, and Economics of Markets and Organisations at Erasmus School of Economics. The National Economic Olympiad is organised in close cooperation with the Royal Dutch Economic Association (KVS) and Erasmus School of Economics. The competition gains interest from various universities across the Netherlands including University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, Maastricht University to name a few, resulting in high numbers of students who apply for the Olympiad.