The Arthur Hosios Scholarship in Economics is one of the Department of Economics’ most prestigious awards. Named in honour of the late Professor Arthur Hosios, the scholarship is awarded to the authors of an original research paper submitted as course work for a 300 or 400 level Economics course.
Applicants for the scholarship see their work evaluated for its originality and presentation. Up to two awards are made each year, one for the winning paper and one for the runner up. This year, three recent alumni will be recognized with this scholarship for work completed in their fourth year of studies.
Yunfei (Kevin) Wang is the winner of the Hosios Award for 2024-25. He won’t be able to attend the Undergraduate Awards of Excellence in Economics ceremony on March 4, 2026. The Innis College Alumnus is now in California where he is a pre-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Wang’s award-winning paper, Racial Divisions and Traffic Stops was inspired by a paper that showed the level of punitiveness in a judicial system can be related to the racial heterogeneity of a county.
“Because judicial officials are locally elected, racial preferences and biases might shape outcomes,” Wang explained. “Counties that are more racially heterogeneous tend to have more punitive systems. I tried to bring that idea into the traffic‑stop environment.”
The paper, completed as part of his ECO499 Honours Essay course with Professor Gustavo Bobonis, Wang looked at the traffic stops made by police in the United States to see if there are patterns related to racial heterogeneity.
“It turns out you can see a similar pattern,” Wang said in a recent online interview. “Counties that are more racially heterogeneous tend to issue more traffic citations, specifically speeding citations. That was a very interesting and surprising finding.”
Wang acknowledges that there are still gaps in the paper that he is currently addressing such as extending his analysis of the data to more states and trying to understand the mechanisms at play.
“It’s one thing to document a correlation between racial heterogeneity and stricter enforcement, but why is it so? Is it police norms? Institutional incentives? Something else? I’m hoping to do more work to pin down the causal mechanisms rather than just the correlations,” he said.
Wang credits the work he did in ECO499 for helping him prepare for his pre-doc fellowship.
“Having one project that’s entirely your own from start to finish, you really learn the whole research process on a small scale,” he explained. “Once you’re a pre‑doc and part of a larger research team, you’re dropped into different stages of much bigger projects, but because you’ve already done a full project yourself, you can not only execute your specific tasks but also understand the broader goals and arc of the research.”
ECO499 is a notoriously labour-intensive course with many students reporting that they put in one and a half credit’s worth of work for the half-credit they ultimately earn.
“You really have to understand, that if you take this class, you’re doing it for the love of the game, not just for the credit,” Wang said. “But writing a paper has a lot of benefits, especially if you’re considering grad school.”
Graduate school is still at the top of Wang’s agenda, but not quite yet. He’ll start applying to PhD programs next year to start after he finishes the second year of his pre-doc fellowship. Until then, he’s continuing to assist his Principal Investigators with their research projects examining a wide variety of topics ranging from cell phone bans to energy storage.
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