Three winners of the Herman Karel Nieuwenhuis Award

During the FEB's new year's reception on 5 January, the 2009 H.K. Nieuwenhuis Award for the best master's thesis was presented to three co-winners. The Faculty of Economics and Business congratulates Mark Walschot, Nicole Stofberg and Nadine Ketel on their achievement. Each winner received a prize of 833 euro.

The jury for the H.K. Nieuwenhuis Award was made up of  Joep Sonnemans, Nachoem Wijnberg and Peter Boswijk. In total, there were eight theses submitted. Two of these were subsequently excluded because they were not master's theses while the remaining submissions were evaluated according to the following criteria:

• Originality and academic quality
• Presentation and clarity
• Social relevance.

Since all submitted theses were well written and dealt with interesting and relevant subjects, the jury considered originality and academic quality to be the most important factors in their evaluations.

The jury found the top three theses to be equal in quality and originality and therefore decided the prize would be shared by three winners. There was also an honourable mention for Bram Kuijken who wrote an interesting thesis on the subject of HRM and the predicting factors regarding the willingness of employees to work abroad as expatriates.

The winning theses

The three co-winners of the 2009 H.K. Nieuwenhuis Award are: Mark Walschot, Nicole Stofberg, and Nadine Ketel.

• Mark Walschot wrote a macroeconomics thesis supervised by Massimo Giuliodori concerning the relationship between intended and realised changes in the Dutch government's budget policy. By carefully analysing real-time Dutch budget data, the thesis demonstrates that changes in the realised budget deficit systematically deviate from the plans. Additionally, the planned changes explain only a small portion of the realised changes;
• Nicole Stofberg's thesis regarding HRM was supervised by Jan-Willem Stoelhorst and examined the incentives for cooperation and knowledge exchange in professional teams. Her thesis combines insights from behavioural economics literature, data obtained using an online vignette study, and statistical techniques from Multi-level analysis. Her research studied the effects of individual reward versus group rewards on the willingness to cooperate and exchange knowledge;
• Nadine Ketel wrote her thesis on development economics. In her thesis, supervised by Hessel Oosterbeek, she examined the impact of unconditional cash transfers on the development of young children in Ecuador. Her thesis first replicates the results of Paxson and Shady who unexpectedly concluded that cash transfers resulted in a positive effect on children's development, even when there were no conditions attached (in the area of school participation or health care). The thesis also demonstrated that these results change when another sample (such as including families from urban areas) is used and when different methods are used to measure family income.

Herman Karel Nieuwenhuis

The Faculty of Business and Economics thesis award is named after Herman Karel Nieuwenhuis, who in 1929 was the first person to graduate with distinction in Economics at the University of Amsterdam. After he passed away in 1982, the H.K. Nieuwenhuis Memorial Fund was founded with the objective of promoting academic research in economics by regularly granting thesis awards.