Celebrating the 2025 Undergraduate Senior Prize Winners and Nominees
Congratulations to the class of 2025! The Department is proud to celebrate all the graduating seniors who received degrees in economics this week, and recognize those students who received Departmental prizes.
Each year, around 30-50 students write senior essays in economics, and the top essays are nominated for prizes by the student’s advisor and a second reader from the department. A committee of economics faculty members read and select the winning essays, and the prizes are awarded on commencement day during the students’ respective college ceremonies.
This year’s nominees included Will Aarons, Lila Alloula, Carl Bager, Mitchell Dubin, Alexandra Paulus, Matt Schwartz, Gabriel Thomaz Vieira, Eli Tsung, and Peter Williams.
The senior essay prizes are as follows:
- The Charles Heber Dickerman Memorial Prize: the best departmental essay(s).
- The Ronald Meltzer/Cornelia Awdziewicz Economic Award: runner-up(s) for the Dickerman Prize.
- The Ellington Prize: the best departmental essay in the field of finance.
The Dickerman Prize for the best departmental essay goes to Matt Schwartz for “Persuasion by an Imperfectly Informed Sender” and to Mitchell Dubin for “Market Power in the U.S. Automobile Industry.”
The Meltzer/Awdziewicz Prize goes to Gabriel Thomaz Vieira for “Assessing Monetary Policy Surprises in Brazil: A High-Frequency SVAR Approach.”
The Ellington Prize goes to Peter Williams for “Expanding Mortgage Credit: The FHLB System's Impact on Small-Dollar Lending, Credit Risk, and Securitization Decisions.”
In addition to essays, the Department of Economics awarded two additional prizes to graduating seniors majoring in economics:
- Laun Prize: outstanding course record in all courses taken at Yale College.
- Massee Prize: outstanding record in economics courses.
This year’s Laun Prize goes to Maya Aidlin-Perlman, and this year’s Massee Prize goes to Alex Ye.
Congratulations to all of these seniors for their exceptional accomplishments! Please see below for more information about the prize winners and nominees.
Matt Schwartz: Dickerman Prize
Senior Essay: Persuasion by an Imperfectly Informed Sender (supervised by Marina Halac)
I study a modification of the standard Bayesian persuasion model where the sender can only condition his message on imperfect information about the state. I investigate the comparative statics of the sender’s utility with respect to his information. I characterize an order over distributions of information, which describes the global comparative statics, and I prove the existence of representative decision problems, which locally approximate the persuasion problem around any fixed information.
“I became interested in communication and persuasion when taking the graduate micro theory classes in my junior year. Over the last year, all of Yale’s theory faculty have supported me tremendously in completing the project.”
— Matt Schwartz, Dickerman Prize Winner
Mitchell Dubin: Dickerman Prize
Senior Essay: Market Power in the U.S. Automobile Industry (supervised by Phil Haile)
In this paper, I quantify the extent and sources of market power in the U.S. automobile industry. I recover a market-wide quantity-weighted average price-cost margin of 19% and further decompose this markup to reveal that product differentiation drives the vast majority of market power (90.8%), more than multi-product brands (5.8%) and multi-brand parent companies (3.5%). I also present the first formal analysis of the proposed Honda-Nissan merger, revealing that while merged-firm markups will increase moderately (7%), market-wide markups rise only negligibly (1.2%).
“Professor O’Dea’s spectacular teaching first introduced me to economics and sparked my fascination with the field, and since then, the Department’s world-class instructors have kept me coming back for more. My deepest thanks to Professors O’Dea, Tsyvinski, Chalioti, Lindenlaub, Altonji, Fair, Polak, and Haile—without whom I would never have developed such a deep appreciation and aptitude for economics.”
— Mitchell Dubin, Dickerman Prize Winner
Gabriel Thomaz Vieira: Meltzer/Awdziewicz Prize
Senior Essay: Assessing Monetary Policy Surprises in Brazil: A High-Frequency SVAR Approach (supervised by Zhen Huo)
My paper develops a structural VAR framework to isolate exogenous monetary shocks in Brazil. It finds that domestic policy surprises have significant medium-to-long-term effects on macroeconomic variables, while U.S. spillovers primarily influence Brazilian financial markets with more limited effects on the broader economy. This study presents a robust and replicable methodology that can be easily expanded to other emerging markets navigating volatile capital flows and structural breaks.
“One of my most cherished memories from my time at Yale was my thesis presentation, which was made special by having many friends there in person and my parents, aunts, cousins, and more family joining online.”
— Gabriel Thomas Vieira, Meltzer/Awdziewicz Prize Winner
Peter Williams: Ellington Prize
Senior Essay: Expanding Mortgage Credit: The FHLB System's Impact on Small-Dollar Lending, Credit Risk, and Securitization Decisions (supervised by Winnie van Dijk and Cameron LaPoint)
My paper studies the effects of the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) system mortgage finance programs on mortgage originators' lending behavior. Through the Mortgage Purchase Program (MPP) and Mortgage Partnership Finance (MPF), the FHLBs offer member institutions an additional secondary market financing outlet for mortgages that uniquely rewards mortgage lenders through additional income on high performing loans while holding lenders responsible for any credit losses on mortgages they sell. I find that take-up of MPP and MPF is higher among lenders who originate more small-dollar mortgages and that use of these programs leads to statistically significant increases in both total and small-dollar mortgage lending by as much as 33%, with these increases accruing mainly to borrowers of lower credit risk.
“My favorite memory in the economics department at Yale was Professor John Geanakoplos's course on General Equilibrium Theory. The course's use of mathematical models to analyze well-motivated questions of general economic interest was fascinating and cemented my interest in the study of economics.”
— Peter Williams, Ellington Prize Winner
Maya Aidlin-Perlman: Laun Prize
Senior Essay: Empowering Women in the Age of AI: Selection into Digital Technology Training Programs in Latin America
Amid growing labor market disruption from technological development, Maya’s thesis investigates patterns of access to a prominent digital skills training program for women across Latin America. Using confidential program data and harmonized national census data, Maya estimates logistic regressions to identify which demographic and socioeconomic factors help predict program application and acceptance—and whether these align with the intended target population. Her work helps address a gap in the literature, which has largely focused on program impact rather than earlier stages of engagement. The thesis concludes with policy recommendations to improve equitable access and proposes avenues for further causal evaluation.
“What drew me to economics is its ability to combine quantitative analysis with qualitative insight to address pressing, real-world questions. Given my strong interest in issues of inequality and development, I see the field as a tool for understanding these challenges and exploring data-driven solutions.”
— Maya Aidlin-Perlman, Laun Prize Winner
Alex Ye: Massee Prize
Senior Essay: The Language of Central Banking: Measuring Complexity and Market Impact (supervised by Bill English)
This thesis examines the linguistic complexity of monetary policy communications from the Federal Reserve, Bank of England, and European Central Bank. It finds that, of the three, FOMC statements tend to be the most semantically complex—using difficult grammatical structures and longer sentences—while Bank of England statements tend to be the most conceptually complex, relying on technical jargon and abstract economic topics. It also investigates whether complexity affects market participants’ understanding of policy by examining the relationship between language complexity and market expectations of forward-looking volatility. The Euro area presents the strongest evidence that language complexity matters: greater semantic complexity is associated with higher expectations of future volatility, while greater conceptual complexity appears to lower these expectations, suggesting a clearer understanding of monetary policy.
“I became interested in economics because it blends quantitative analysis with a wide range of interesting questions. It provides insights into how people make decisions and offers the tools to design policies that address a variety of societal challenges.”
— Alex Ye, Massee Prize Winner
The following students produced top essays that were nominated by the student’s advisor and a second reader from the department.
Will Aarons
Senior Essay: Electoral Incentives, Partisan Identity, and Local Police Responses to the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests in U.S. Cities (supervised by Gerard Padr´o i Miquel)
This paper assesses the impact of local partisan control on BLM protest incidence and police responses. Using georeferenced event data and a local elections database, we implement a close-elections regression discontinuity on a range of protest outcomes. We find evidence that Republican mayoral incumbency causally reduced average citywide BLM protest incidence by 49.7%, conditional on demographics.
“I came to economics later in college after realizing that the subject can cover almost any question of cause and effect that someone might wonder, even one that has nothing to do with stocks or prices. I’m grateful to Gerard Padro i Miquel (my advisor), Rohini Pande, Costas Meghir, and many other Yale mentors for showing me the broad impact that economic research can have when carried out with creativity and humility.”
— Will Aarons
Lila Alloula
Senior Essay: Shrinkflation in the Snack Aisle: Evidence from Doritos’ 2021 Downsizing (advised by Benjamin Polak)
This paper studies shrinkflation—the practice of reducing package sizes while maintaining prices—using novel transaction-level data. Leveraging a multi-period difference-in-differences design, it isolates the effects of a 2021 Doritos downsizing on consumer behavior. The results show that shrinkflation often goes unnoticed in real time, regardless of state-level price disclosure regulations—with pack sales, revenue and even ounce sales increasing—raising concerns about transparency and consumer welfare.
“My favorite memory of Econ at Yale has been working as a ULA for Professor O’Dea’s Econ 115 course. Beyond the intellectual challenge of reengaging with microeconomics through the lens of teaching, it felt full circle to lead weekly sections for the class that first inspired me to major in economics.”
— Lila Alloula
Carl Bager
Senior Essay: The Impact of Broadband on the Financial Performance of Firms in Denmark (advised by Mark Rosenzweig)
I demonstrate with micro-data that an exogenous increase from under 5 Mbps to over 1,000 Mbps in broadband speeds significantly improves the financial performance of firms in Denmark. I find robust and statistically significant increases with heterogeneous industry effects for firms in assets, net income, and firm survival, and for firms with employees, increases in employees, wages, and wage per employee.
“My own community in Denmark received broadband subsidies seven years ago, and in my senior essay I got to study the effect of these using what I learned during my time at Yale.”
— Carl Bager
Alexandra Paulus
Senior Essay: Modeling Demand in the Electric Vehicle Lithium-Ion Battery Market
The market for electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries is rapidly evolving and highly complex, involving differentiated products and long-term supply agreements. In this study, battery production costs are systematically estimated from the chemical composition of each battery type; subsequently, a nested logit demand model is built and run in order to better understand the factors that drive consumer choices and market welfare. It is found that prices and energy density are major drivers of consumer choices, within-manufacturer substitution patterns play a key role in explaining market dynamics, and innovations in battery chemistry have raised consumer surplus on the order of 2-5%.
“I chose to write my thesis on the EV battery market because it allowed me to combine my two academic interests in Economics and Chemistry to investigate questions relevant to innovation economics, market dynamics, and the energy transition at large.”
— Alexandra Paulus
Eli Tsung
Senior Essay: Wages & Multidimensional Skill Mismatch: Evidence from LinkedIn
My paper examines the relationship between worker skills, occupational skill requirements, and skill mismatch using multidimensional data from LinkedIn and O*NET. I construct a novel mapping from 136 O*NET skill dimensions to 50 LinkedIn skill clusters, allowing for empirical comparison of worker skill profiles and job requirements in a unified framework. I use this mapping to estimate how worker skills, occupational skill requirements, and their alignment in 2021 predict salary in 2024.
“My interest in economics was sparked by a seminar on the political economy of gender in South Asia. I found it fascinating how economic theory and econometric methods were used to understand critical social, cultural, and policy questions.”
— Eli Tsung