This year for the first time, our Master- and PhD-students who have written the best thesis are honoured with the price Rudi Dornbusch and the price Leonid Hurwicz, respectively. Carlos Galian Barrueco succesfully finished his Master in International Economics and was rewarded the price Rudi Dornbusch for his thesis entitled Targeting the Poor: Theory vs. Reality. His supervisor, Professor Jean-Louis Arcand, summarizes the rewarded thesis as follows:
"Carlos Galian received the Rudi Dornbusch Prize for his dissertation on the pitfalls of Proxy Means Testing (PMT), an econometric method used to identify poor households in developing countries. He found that size matters and that PMT could be beneficial with respect to random targeting when budgets are large enough, but the converse holds when budgets are small"