June 7: Economics PhD Students win scholarships

Posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

Congratulations go to Marcel Oestreich and Fraser Summerfield who have been awarded Ontario Graduate Scholarships.   Marcel's dissertation is on the economics of environmental enforcement policy.   His research is motivated by the fact that it is often prohibitively costly to continuously monitor every polluter’s pollution emissions.  Therefore, market-based instruments, as well as command-and-control programs, must rely heavily on a requirement for polluters to self-report their pollution emissions. Designing the policy to encourage truthful reporting then becomes an important challenge.  The overall objective is to determine what kinds of design will encourage polluters to truthfully report violations and what kinds of designs encourage the opposite behaviour, and what elements of the design optimize the cost-effectiveness of the policy.

Fraser's research focuses on labor markets from the perspective of the workforce.  Labor markets are an increasingly important focus for policymakers as we emerge from the recent downturn.  His current work includes empirical investigations into the future labor market prospects for temporary workers, and the contribution of labor market conditions to crime rates in Canada.   In addition to this work, Fraser's dissertation will investigate job search and matching frameworks in an effort to understand how individual worker decisions can affect employment trends.

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