Jasmine Hao, a PhD student at the Vancouver School of Economics, is this year’s winner of the Graduate Student Paper Award from the Bank of Canada.
The national award recognizes high quality research from graduate students in economics or finance and comes with a $2500 prize. Hao’s paper focuses on collusion over price fixing in the Chilean pharmaceutical industry.
“The literature has focused on which type of market is most likely to see collusion take place but few papers have focused on how hard it is for firms to participate in the collusion and to keep everyone else on the same page,” said Hao, who presented her paper to a virtual panel of Bank of Canada officials earlier this year.
Hao is set to enter the job market as a PhD candidate shortly and hopes to continue a career in academia after graduating from UBC.
Her award-winning paper, Building up Trust in a Dynamic Game: A study on Collusive Price-fixing in the Chilean Pharmaceutical Retail Industry, can be read here.