Excellence in Economic Writing: Celebrating Fall 2025 Award Winners
Since spring 2024, the Department of Economics has partnered with the Writing-Enriched Curriculum (WEC) to host an undergraduate paper competition. Students are challenged to refine their coursework into polished research that showcases analytical rigor and clear communication. Each semester students submit their best work — papers that earned 90% or higher in writing-intensive courses, capstone projects or honors thesis.
“The papers submitted were all outstanding,” said Undergraduate Director Ayca Ozdogan Atabay. “It was not easy to finalize the awards this semester.”
This fall, 42 students submitted papers answering questions like: Can machine learning predict equity premiums? Does adding women to corporate boards change firm strategy? How has digital infrastructure shaped regional inequality?
A committee of faculty and Ph.D. students evaluated each submission for the qualities that distinguish strong economic writing: conceptually cohesive arguments built from complex data, clear interpretation of sophisticated models and critical analysis of economic relationships.
"Students realize they can produce a research paper they would not have imagined when they started the project," said Atabay. “This motivates the students to conduct research, do analysis and present their findings logically and sets them up for success.”
The Fall 2025 winners are:
Honors Thesis/HHEI Research:
First Place: Justin Zhang, “Learning the Equity Premium: A Bart Model of Multidimensional Risk.”
Zhang developed his thesis after finding interesting results while conducting summer research with a professor. “The research is exciting because of how challenging it is to find strong predictor variables, and I am optimistic that new machine learning can be applied to the field,” he said. “I think future work in equity premium predictability could further insights in finance, for example how monetary policy affects risk premia.”
Second Place: Anushka Raychaudhuri, “Occupational Task Intensity Dynamics, Skill-Task Interactions, and Wages Evidence for the NLSY97.”
Third Place: Runyu Zhu, “Asymmetric Heterogeneous Belief Adjustment and Speculative Trade: Extension of Harris and Ravi (1993).”
Senior Capstone:
First Place: Annabelle Jones, “ How do Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Ratings Affect Firm Specific Risk?”
Jones was drawn to ESG standards because of their relative newness and emerging popularity. “The innovative nature of ESG-related research makes it an especially compelling topic for economists seeking to expand their studies,” she said. “The consistent evolution of ESG standards pressure firms to adapt to the changing culture regarding transparency and responsibility… By focusing on the relationship between ESG ratings and firm-specific risk, I seek to uncover and quantify how ESG ratings and standards affect markets in real-time.”
Second Place: Baojia Chen, “What is the Effect of California's Board-Gender Mandate on Strategy and Performance?”
Third Place: Riley Stern, “ Parental Involvement & Primary School Performance: Insights from the ECLK-K.”
Writing Intensive Course:
First Place: Harry Lu, “Digital Development Convergence in the United States: A Spatial and Temporal Analysis from 2013 to 2023.”
Lu, a triple major in economics, mathematics and computer science, investigates digital infrastructure growth through classical economic frameworks. "I am particularly interested in bridging computational methods with classical economic theory," he said. "By applying convergence models and spatial econometrics to digital infrastructure, I explore whether technological progress naturally narrows inequality or whether coordinated policy intervention remains essential."
Second Place: Asher Smith, “Does Trade Centrality Predict Cocaine Seizure Rates?”
Third Place: Ayaz Hussain, “The Changing College Premium.”
In Their Own Words
“I chose to focus on how the task content of occupations interacts with a worker’s skill set. I became interested in how people find their place in the labor market and how wages respond when a worker’s skills are better matched to the tasks an occupation requires. It was my first time working with a large longitudinal panel dataset like the NLSY97, and it brought together theoretical concepts I had learned in econometrics and advanced labor economics into a real-world framework.” — Anushka Raychaudhuri (Honors Thesis/HHEI)
“I selected this topic because I am interested in women’s leadership and wanted to see what it means in the room where the biggest corporate decisions are made. California’s SB 826 serves as a natural starting point, as it mandates gender diversity on boards. This law provides a clear opportunity to analyze how governance regulations influence actual firm behavior rather than just public statements about inclusion … Behind the empirical work is a simple question that drives my interest — when we change who sits at the table, do we also change the decisions firms make, the resources they allocate, and the priorities they pursue?” — Baojia Chen (Senior Capstone)
"I chose to study the effects of parental involvement on elementary school academic performance because I believe this is one of the most foundational, and often overlooked, aspects of a child's educational ecosystem. In my own experience, I believe my academic success was largely the result of the support I received within my household. However, this reality is not always feasible for all families. When designing optimal labor force and education policies, it is important to acknowledge the impact parental involvement can have on a child's academic success, and we need to work to accommodate families in making this involvement possible." — Riley Stern (Senior Capstone)
"I kept seeing news articles and online discussions claiming that the labor market was particularly weak for recent college graduates. Initially, I wanted to study what exactly was 'causing' the job market to feel so difficult. After discussing it with Professor Malmberg, I realized that this was an extremely complex question. Instead, he encouraged me to step back and document what the college premium actually looks like today and see how it's changed over time. My goal became to paint a clear picture of how unemployment and wages differ for recent graduates with and without a bachelor's degree." — Ayaz Hussain (Intensive writing course)
“Moving beyond representative agent models, I became interested in how disagreement among rational agents can itself drive trade and instability. Under Professor Werner’s guidance, I learned to build macro-financial insights from explicit micro mechanisms by deriving belief dynamics, characterizing switching boundaries, and embedding them into equilibrium pricing. What attracts me most is this rigorous process of showing how small asymmetries in information processing can produce nonlinear aggregate outcomes.” — Runyu Zhu (Honors Thesis/HHEI Research)
