SIRE lecturer Dr Yu Aoki has been awarded the Cairncross Prize for the best paper presented by a young economist at this years' Scottish Economic Society conference.
The paper is entitled “An outcome of free labour supply: effects of volunteer work on mortality. A natural experiment using earthquake shocks in Japan” The paper uses the exogenous variation caused by the Great Hanshin-Awaji earthquake which occurred in the Midwestern part of Japan in 1995 to identify the causal effect of volunteering on mortality
Dr Aoki will be presenting her prize winning paper at the Health Economics Research Unit seminar series on the 5th June in room 3:052 in the Polwarth Building at 11.30am
After completing her PhD in Economics at the University of Warwick, she joined the University as the Joint SIRE lecturer for of the Aberdeen Business School and the Health Economics Research Unit.
She is also a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA) in Bonn, Germany.
Her work focuses on the application of econometric analysis to issues related to health, labour and education.
Dr Aoki was delighted to receive the Cairncross Prize in recognition of her outstanding work as a young economist.
The Scottish Economic Society instituted a Prize Essay Competition to express its commitment to the development of the discipline, directed at encouraging younger members of the profession. It is called the Sir Alexander Cairncross Prize, to mark the contribution which he made to the Society and to the discipline. It was first awarded in 1998.
During his long and distinctively active career Sir Alec Cairncross made distinguished contributions in several walks of life – as Economic Adviser to the Government (1961-64), Head of the Government Economic Service (1964-69), Master of St Peters College Oxford (1969-78), President of the British Association (1970-71) and writer of several books on economic policy – and by no means least at the University of Glasgow as Professor of Applied Economics (1950-61) and subsequently its Chancellor from 1972 to 1996.
He also contributed signally to the development of the Scottish Economic Society. In 1954 he became the first Editor of the Society's Scottish Journal of Political Economy, a post he held until 1961. A Vice President from 1962 he became President from 1969 to 1973, and remained an Honorary Vice President thereafter.
Professor Anton Muscatelli, the current Principal at the University of Glasgow presented the prize at the Society’s Sir Alex Cairncross Memorial Dinner on Monday the 8th April 2013.