ZEW Presents 2014 Heinz König Young Scholar Award to US Researcher

Olga Malkova from the University of Michigan, US, received the 2014 Heinz König Young Scholar Award of the Mannheim Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW). The jury recognised Malkova's excellent research on the effects of parental leave benefits on birth rates. Her work is an important contribution to the debate on the effectiveness of family policy measures. The Heinz König Young Scholar Award comes with an endowment of EUR 5,000 and includes the opportunity to spend an extended research visit at ZEW. This year’s award was sponsored by Freudenberg SE, a member of the ZEW Sponsors’ Association for Science and Practice.

Most industrialised countries are facing the challenges of an ageing society and low birth rates. Olga Malkova's award-winning paper empirically shows how, in the 1980s, birth rates in Russia were impacted by the introduction of parental leave benefits, which amounted to 20 per cent of the average national monthly income plus a one-off payment. Her econometric analyses show that birth rates increased by five per cent within the first twelve months after the introduction of the measures. Though the effect decreased in the subsequent years, there remained a positive outcome.

The Heinz König Young Scholar Award is named after the late founding director of ZEW, Professor Heinz König, who died in 2002. The award honours up-and-coming researchers who have performed outstanding empirical research. In keeping with Heinz König’s ideas, ZEW has no intention of adding yet another award to the huge number of prizes for established researchers, but promotes talented economists in their early career stages.

The Heinz König Young Scholar Award was presented at the 2014 ZEW Summer Workshop, which focused on recent trends in microeconometrics and programme evaluation. The objective of the workshop is to train up-and coming researchers.

This year, 21 papers were selected for presentation out of more than 250 submissions. The selected researchers were invited to the Summer Workshop where they had the opportunity to discuss their work with other up-and-coming researchers and renowned economists such as Gerard J. van den Berg from the University of Mannheim, Ivan Fernandez-Val from Boston University and Ed Vytlacil from New York University.  Van den Berg, Fernandez-Val, and Vytlacil also held lectures at the workshop and selected the award winner.

For more information please contact

Irene Bertschek, Phone +49 (0)621/1235-178, E-mail bertschek@zew.de  

Holger Bonin, Phone +49 (0)621/1235-155, E-mail bonin@zew.de