ZEW Economist Honoured with Gerhard Fürst Award

Awards

Christina Meyer Receives Award for Young Researchers from Federal Statistical Office

Award winner Christina Meyer (center) with Destatis President Dr. Georg Thiel and laudator Professor Dr. Walter Krämer from the Technical University of Dortmund (from left to right in the picture).

Christina Meyer, a researcher in the ZEW Research Department “International Finance and Financial Management”, received the Gerhard Fürst Award of the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on 18 November 2021. The award aims to promote young researchers. She was honoured in the category master’s/bachelor’s theses for her master’s thesis on gender-specific differences in old-age provision after the introduction of so-called unisex tariffs in the Riester pension scheme.

In her thesis, she examined the effect of the introduction of unisex tariffs on men’s Riester pension contracts. The Tax Payer Panel (TPP), which contains information from the income tax returns of German taxpayers, served as the data basis for the econometric analyses.

Christina Meyer completed her master’s thesis at the LMU Munich under the supervision of Professor Joachim Winter and ZEW research department head Professor Tabea Bucher-Koenen. Together with her ZEW colleagues, Christina Meyer continues to work with the TPP in the context of the ZEW project “The Distributional Implications of Tax-Favoured Retirement Accounts: Evidence from German Tax-Return Data”.

About the Gerhard Fürst Award

Since 1999, the Federal Statistical Office has granted the Gerhard Fürst Award for dissertations and master’s/bachelor’s theses every year. It honours outstanding works that

  • deal with theoretical topics with a close link to the scope of duties of official statistics, or
  • examine empirical questions with the intense use of data from official statistics.

These can be works in theoretical statistics or in economic and social statistics, as well as theses in economics or the social sciences.