Tam Le and Anthony McCanny have tied for the inaugural Best Second Year Paper Award. The prize carries a monetary value of $1000 that the two PhD students will split. The newly formed award goes to the best second year research paper submitted, on time, as part of the Graduate Research Seminar as determined by the committee.
“The shift from structured coursework to independent research is one of the most challenging stages of a PhD,” said Professor Colin Stewart, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies at the Department of Economics. “We created this award to celebrate outstanding second-year papers that showcase the high quality of scholarship our students produce during this critical transition.”
The committee, composed of professors Jason Choi, Rob Clark, and Rob McMillan, determined that the two students were equally deserving and should share this year’s prize.
“I am very honored to receive this recognition, and I am grateful that the department created this award to highlight strong second-year research,” said Tam Le who is now in the third year of her PhD. “It is very encouraging to have my work recognized at this stage, and it gives me confidence and motivation to keep developing the project.”
Le’s paper, Wasted Innovation? Zombie Firms, R&D Misallocation, and Productivity Slowdown, studies how zombie firms—financially weak firms that survive through continued access to credit—affect innovation and productivity in Canada.
“Tam’s paper addresses pressing productivity challenges facing Canada (and other advanced economies) through an understudied but important interdisciplinary lens at the nexus of economic growth and finance,” said Professor Mark Rempel, Le’s supervisor. “Leveraging frontier continuous-time techniques, she introduces a novel cash-flow based financing distortion in an endogenous growth model with firm dynamics that can capture joint firm investment, growth and debt patterns documented in Canadian micro-data. The resulting paper offers a rare combination of well-executed reduced form, theoretical and structural estimation-based (quantitative) assessment of a research question of first-order economic importance and general interest.”
Anthony McCanny’s paper, Finite-Sample Valid Tests for Bounded Treatment Effects, investigates randomization in trials. There are many occasions in empirical economics where sample sizes are small, or the distributional assumptions needed to use traditional asymptotic statistics do not hold.
“Anthony’s paper makes an important contribution to finite-sample inference, an area of growing importance in economics when researchers work with limited data,” said Professor Yuanyuan Wan, who supervised McCanny’s work. “His work extends randomization-based methods to a broader class of meaningful non-sharp hypotheses and introduces a novel algorithm that can reduce computation burden. Just as importantly, the project reflects an impressive path of independent research and has the potential to place well in a very top econometrics or statistics journal.”
Like many students, McCanny said he was aware of “all the flaws” of his paper while he was writing it.
“When you’re too close to the subject matter, it can be hard to tell if what you’re work on has any merit,” he said. “So receiving this award feels like a wonderful show of confidence to keep working on this, and maybe believe in my work a bit more.”
Return to the Department of Economics website.
Scroll more news.