VAN DIJK AWARDED RICHARD SALLER DISSERTATION PRIZE (2020)

PUBLISHED ON MAY 6, 2020

Winnie van Dijk has been selected as one of this year’s two recipients of the Richard Saller Dissertation Prize, which recognizes the most outstanding dissertations of the year.

The prize is awarded annually through the work of a multidisciplinary faculty committee. Van Dijk is the Department’s second recipient since the inception of the prize in 1986-87; Chinhui Juhn was the recipient in 1991-92.

Van Dijk's dissertation, Essays on Rental Housing Market Policies and the Socio-Economic Mobility of Low-Income Households, analyzes the effect of Europe's largest public housing program on a wide range of socio-economic outcomes, including labor market outcomes, neighborhood and housing quality, and public assistance receipt. In the work, she also uses a choice model to characterize individuals' application decisions and to recover the distribution of heterogeneity driving selection into and returns from lotteries. Ufuk Akcigit, Director of Graduate Studies, wrote that her work "achieves the rare combination of contributions that define exemplary scholarship in empirical social science: methodological innovation, meticulous measurement, and illuminating policy relevance.”

Van Dijk received her Ph.D. in 2019. She is currently a Saieh Family Fellow in Economics at BFI, and she will continue in July as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University.