Undergraduate Awards

The Economics Department awards four prizes annually:

1. The Tate Whitman Prize in Economics
2. The Jack and Lewis Greenhut Prize
3. The George Benston and Richard Muth Prize for Excellence in Economics
4. Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

This award is for the ability to present clear, cogent analysis of complex issues, extraordinary personal integrity, and wise leadership in the classroom and department.

2022 Recipient is Andrew Taber

Andrew’s thesis, supervised by Chris Karbownik, is on the effects of racial-equity pledges on firms’ stock prices. In the wake of the black lives matter movement, US firms made over $65 billion in pledges to racial equity. Using DID design, Andrew finds short-term negative effect on stock value for firms that make larger pledges, but short-term positive effects on stock value for firms that male smaller pledges, suggesting that investors value these pledges when they are not too costly.

After graduation, Andrew will be moving back to Madison, Wisconsin to start as a Project Manager for Epic in June. Epic is an electronic health record and software company.

Congratulations to Andrew Taber!

This prize is awarded to a graduating senior who has demonstrated the highest degree of excellence in classwork, research, and scholarly activities.

2022 Recipient is Nicholas Skelley 

Nicholas’s thesis, supervised by Kelli Lanier, analyzes the effects of loss on dishonest behavior under expected value and money manipulation frames. He recruited over 400 subjects to undertake his experiment, even developing a custom web platform for subjects to access a fair die remotely. He found no significant evidence that loss affects honesty in Expected Value framing, contrasting previous evidence. He did find evidence that loss decreases lying under Money Manipulation framing, consistent with existing literature. These differences have important implications for defaults, trust, and dishonesty detection.

Nick will be joining MIT this summer as a pre-doctoral research associate. 

Congratulations to Nicholas Skelley!

This award celebrates the spirit of both Prof. George Benston and Prof. Richard Muth, whose strong commitment to research and reputation for excellence helped facilitate Emory’s change to becoming the world class research institution it is today. In their honor, we give this award to the student who demonstrates exemplary intellectual curiosity, passion, and skill in economic analysis.

2022 Recipient is Leah Hartung

Leah did an independent research paper, under the supervision of Stephen O’Connell, about the environmental justice implications of the 2016 Ethylene Oxide classification. She studies Ethlyene Oxide, which in December of 2016 was changed by the EPA to be a “known human carcinogen” with health effects 60 times more toxic to children and 30 times more toxic to adults than previous estimates. In her paper, she presents a geospatial model to determine the correlation between the presence of EtO, amount of EtO, and socioeconomic factors from census data.

After graduation, Leah is moving to Washington D.C. to work as a climate change and sustainability researcher at ICF, and she hopes to continue volunteering at grassroots environmental justice organizations.

Congratulations to Leah Hartung!

This award recognizes undergraduate students who have served as exceptional teaching assistants in our Economics classes.

2022 Recipient is Christina Leonard

Christina has served as a TA for two of our core courses. First, she was a TA for Hashem Dezhbakhsh’s Econ 101 class on Principles of Microeconomics with more than 180 students in it. In Hashem’s words, “This position involves many TA responsibilities, some shared with a graduate TA. Christina’s overall record and interest in the class made her one of the top candidates for this position, despite the fact that juniors and seniors were used for this position before.  She was chosen and started serving during the pandemic year where responsibilities were much more serious and demand on TAs the highest. She had to also contribute to extra curriculum interactions designed to mitigate student isolation, and her contributions on this project were critical in ensuring it’s success.”

She was also a TA in Elena Pesavento’s Econ 220 class on Probability and Statistics for Economists. In Elena’s words, “Christina did an excellent job, always on time, always encouraging students and giving great feedback. Remarkably she requires very little supervision (something that any faculty can appreciate). Her best quality is that she is a great team player, ready to step up when one of the other TAs is running into difficulties or is running behind.”

This summer, Christina will be interning at Cantor Fitzgerald for their Sales and Trading program.

Congratultaions to Christina Leonard!