Explore Econ 2023 winners announced

Explore Econ was back for its ninth year, highlighting the excellent independent research of our undergraduate students.

The Ignite Session hosted a student-staff panel discussion chaired by UCL Economics’ Professor Peter Postl and featuring Professor Erkko Autio (Imperial College) and Chat GPT alongside UCL students Suraj Sridhar and Harshita Bakliwal on ‘Digital Transformation and Innovation.’

A panel of judges heard presentations from each of the shortlisted candidates and the conference awarded prizes for:

• Best Research Submission

Awarded to William Nguyen for his paper ‘Investigating the Distributional Effect of the UK Carbon Price Floor’

• Best Research Submission (runner-up)

Awarded to Hwee Ru Kom, Pavel Sizov and Joseph Bryant for their ‘Data Visualisation Tools for Microeconomics’ poster

• People’s Choice Award

Awarded to Iain Simmons for this paper entitled ‘Score! What is it good for?’

A further Stone Centre Prize for the best inequality-related submission was awarded to Matias Makiranta for his paper entitled ‘Labour Market Concentration and Worker Mobility: Evidence From Online Vacancies.’ Matias now joins the Stone Centre at UCL as a Stone Scholar, alongside Gaurav Khatri who won last year’s prize.

“Explore Econ Executive Committee Chair Dr Ramin Nassehi said, ‘I am thrilled to be here again and witness the incredible energy and enthusiasm of all the participants at this year's conference. The sense of community and genuine engagement that permeates Explore Econ is truly authentic and inspiring. Explore Econ is special because students are actively involved in every aspect of its organization, starting from generating ideas and planning, to promoting the event, reviewing submissions, and ensuring a flawless live execution. I’m so proud to be part of this collaborative student-staff project!’

“CTaLE Director and UCL Economics Professor Parama Chaudhury said, ‘CTaLE started Explore Econ in 2015 as a way to encourage students to complement their degree programme with co-curricular research on topics which caught their fancy. Since then, Explore Econ has only gone from strength to strength. It was inspiring to see our students expand their horizons, engage with hot topics and present to an audience of peers and academics. The future of economics is bright!’

Explore Econ is UCL Department of Economics’ annual undergraduate research conference, inspired by research-based education and organised by the Centre for Teaching and Learning Economics (CTaLE).