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Warwick Graduate Wins Economics Prize for 2nd Consecutive Year

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Warwick Graduate Wins Economics Prize for 2nd Consecutive Year

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Theodore Koutmeridis, a 2013 PhD graduate of the University of Warwick Department of Economics, has won the Cairncross Prize, given annually by the Scottish Economic Society for the best research paper by a younger member of the society.

The prize is presented in memory of Sir Alexander Cairncross, whose distinguished career included serving as Economic Adviser to the Government, Head of the Economic Service, and Professor of Applied Economics and Chancellor at the University of Glasgow.

Koutmeridis is a lecturer at the School of Economics & Finance at the University of St Andrews. He was awarded the prize for his paper, “The Market for ‘Rough Diamonds’: Information, Finance and Wage Inequality,” which posits that rising inequality in the US since the 1970s can be explained by the rising equality of opportunity in education.

This is the second consecutive year that a Warwick Economics PhD has been selected as the winner of the Cairncross Prize. In 2013, Yu Aoki was the recipient for her paper, “An Outcome of Free Labour Supply: Effects of Volunteer Work on Mortality. A Natural Experiment Using Earthquake Shocks in Japan.” The paper examines the causal effect of volunteering on mortality through the lens of events following the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in 1995. Yu Aoki is an assistant professor of Economics in the University of Aberdeen Business School and the Health Economics Research Unit, as well as a research affiliate at the Institute for the Study of Labour in Bonn, Germany.