Economics alumnus Gertjan Driessen wins ENCORE Master’s Thesis Prize

Gertjan Driessen has been awarded the ENCORE Master’s Thesis Prize 2007 for his Master’s thesis in General Economics. The prize consists of EUR 3000 and publication of his thesis by the Netherlands Competition Authority (NMa). Driessen graduated in 2006 with an international study on types of competition among railway companies, conducted during his internship at the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB). His supervisor at the Faculty of Economics was Dr Bert Schoonbeek; the CPB supervisor was Dr Machiel Mulder.

ENCORE (Economics Network for Competition and Regulation) is an international research network, founded by the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs, the NMa (Netherlands Competition Authority) and the OPTA (Netherlands Independent Post and Telecommunication Authority). The ENCORE Master’s Thesis Prize competition is a national competition for theses in the field of Industrial Organization.

Thesis

For his thesis entitled ‘Competition Design and Efficiency in Railways’, Driessen investigated the effects of competition on efficiency in 14 countries. In the Netherlands, for example, competition was introduced in the form of public tenders, such as the one for a number of railway lines in the north issued to NoordNed. The economist mapped the efficiency in each country and by means of calculations demonstrated that different types of competition result in different efficiency levels. It turns out that putting out to tender in particular results in a higher level of efficiency.

Jury

According to the jury’s report on Driessen’s thesis, ‘It is an impressive achievement to tackle a policy-relevant problem in such a comprehensive way, and the jury would like to add that this thesis was very well written’. The publisher, the NMa, through its chair, stated that ‘It is an original piece of work which tackles a highly relevant problem that is the competition in railways both from a more theoretical and from an empirical side.’  

Gertjan Driessen is currently working as a policy officer at the Ministry of Finance.

Further information

For more information please contact Gertjan Driessen MSc, tel.: 070 342 8858, e-mail: g.driessen minfin.nl