Heinz König Award 2025 Presented to Three Young Researchers

For 25 years now, ZEW Mannheim has been presenting the Heinz König Award for outstanding scientific work by young scholars. This year, there are three prize winners. The first prize, which is endowed with 2,500 euros, goes to David Leite, PhD from the Paris School of Economics for his paper “The Firm as Tax Shelter: Micro Evidence and Aggregate Implications of Consumption Through the Firm”. Leite demonstrates how business owners falsely declare personal expenses as tax-deductible business costs. He concludes that the overall scale of this form of tax avoidance is considerable.

The second prize, worth 1,500 euros, is awarded by the jury to Mona Barake, PhD from Skatteforsk – Centre for Tax Research at the Norwegian University for Life Sciences. Together with her co-author Hjalte Fejerskov Boas from the University of Copenhagen, she wrote the paper “Enforcing Taxes on Cryptocurrencies”. The authors show how income from cryptocurrencies is distributed and find that this growing source of income largely escapes taxation.

Lucia Contreras from the University of Manchester receives the third prize, endowed with 1,000 euros, for her paper “Behavioural Responses to Tax Systems: Evidence from Costa Rica’s Corporate Tax Reform”. Together with her co-author Jonathan Garita, PhD from the Central Bank of Costa Rica and the University of Costa Rica, she analyses corporate responses to a series of corporate tax reforms. Their findings provide policymakers with a deeper understanding of how to design effective corporate tax systems.

Professor Zareh Asatryan, deputy head of the Research Unit “Corporate Taxation and Public Finance,” praised the top-ranked submissions: “The three award-winning papers represent remarkable achievements by young researchers. They present findings with clearly identified causal relationships on issues of great political relevance.”