Celebrating 2024-25 Laurier Economics Department student achievements

The Lazaridis School’s Department of Economics faculty, students, and staff gathered on the afternoon of April 1 in Lazaridis Hall for our annual Economics Student Appreciation event. The afternoon was an opportunity to recognize scholarship recipients, competition winners, and other student successes. 

Congratulations to all the students who received awards for their hard work and willingness to get involved in the Laurier community.  

And thank you to event organizers Justin Smith, Patrycja Gadomski-Cebo and Parker Nicholls for their work in bringing everyone together at what is a busy time of year for everyone.   

University / Donor sponsored awards 

Economics Department-specific 

Professor Emeritus Frank Millerd along with Elsie Millerd were on hand to present the award endowed in their name to Miraide Palmer.  The Frank and Elsie Millerd Award in Economics is granted to a third- or fourth-year undergraduate student pursuing an honours degree in Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, with equal weight to academic achievement and community service. The recipient must have a minimum overall GPA of B+ in all economics courses and must demonstrate an ongoing, current, and significant commitment to community involvement and service on or off campus, with preference given to applicants who volunteer or work in humanitarian, social justice, or community building activities.  This year’s award went to Miraide Palmer.  One of our Bank of Canada team members, Miraide credits the Challenge for the opportunity it gave her to apply everything she learned in my undergrad to real-world economic challenges.  Miraide is planning to deepen her knowledge of macroeconomic modelling and international trade dynamics in studying for her MA in Economics (PhD track) at McMaster University next year.

* For several awards, winners can only be determined after the end of the Winter term.

Peter Sinclair Awards: Fall 2024 

The Peter Sinclair Awards are named in honour of former Economics Department faculty member and long-time Undergraduate Program Director, Peter Sinclair.  They are awarded each term to the papers judged to be the strongest economics research paper of those submitted.   

Winner: Lana El-Masry (Trusting Ties: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Student Trust Dynamics) 

Runner-up: Madison Aquino (Financial Literacy and Mortgage Delinquency: A Study of Canadian Borrowers) 

Honorable Mentions: Cole Cashmore (GDP versus the Happiness Index: How Does a Nations Use of a Primary Economic Indicator Affect their Prosperity? ); and Nithin Kumar (Federal Incentives and EV Adoption (2016-2023): The Role of State-Level Factors) 

Lana El-Masry’s paper “Trusting Ties: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Student Trust Dynamics” El-Masry examines whether domestic university students are awarded higher levels of trust than international students. To answer this question, the author administered an online survey of 256 Wilfrid Laurier students from a range of undergraduate programs. Each survey respondent was given a random opponent for a hypothetical game that required cooperation and trust amongst the players. The results show that less trust awarded when respondents were playing against an international student. This suggests that non-permanent residents, a section of the population that includes international students, are less trusted in Canadian society.  Lana will be attending the University of Toronto to study for a Master’s degree in 2025-26.  

Madison Aquino’s paper “Financial Literacy and Mortgage Delinquency: A Study of Canadian Borrowers” investigates the role of financial literacy in reducing mortgage delinquency among Canadian homeowners. Findings reveal a strong negative relationship between financial literacy and mortgage delinquency, with savings and investment behaviours showing the strongest impact. 

“On behalf of the Economics Department, we would like to congratulate Lana and Madison on their excellent research papers and we wish them every success in their careers,” said Associate Chair of the Department, Edda Claus.  “As in previous years, we received many high-quality submissions and, even though they may not have won the prize, the Economics Department congratulates all of our students who submitted papers on their excellent research.” 

We also celebrated the previously announced winners of the awards for the Winter/Spring 2024: Rhea Sen and David Griffin, and the runner up Alexander Bond.

SMITH Competition

This is the second year the department has run an economics prediction competition, the Students Mastering Intriguing Testable Hypotheses (SMITH) Competition. The competition is based on the Kaggle Data Science Competition, where participants use data to build and test predictions. This year’s theme was predicting wages for individuals using variables available in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS). Student teams whose models did best at predicting wages on a reserved set of data won a cash prize, and to the delight of the audience a trophy featuring a 3D image of the competition founder, Justin Smith.  

Smith, the organizer of the competition, said “The competition is designed to be a fun, low-pressure way for students to apply their knowledge of statistics by building a model to predict a real-world economic outcome. I'm happy to see so many students using this opportunity not only to practice the techniques they've learned in class, but also to explore more advanced, cutting-edge methods they might not have seen before.” 

A feature of this year’s teams was their use of newer prediction methods including machine learning/AI techniques.  The fourth-year team, the Wage Wizards, learned how to use Stata to implement a Random Forest Algorithm, using an ensemble of decision trees to make predictions, combining the outputs of multiple trees to improve its accuracy. They say that they were motivated by the chance to apply machine learning tools and their knowledge of economic theory to a real-world data problem. One of their key takeaways was that you can use your mistakes to improve your models. They also commented on how impressed they were with the work being done by the students earlier in the program.  Marcus Asimis, a second year student and a solo entrant, started the competition before he’d taken the program’s second year statistics course did the majority of the work using the IBMWatsonX interface and algorithms – loading the data in, cleaning it, and performed a hyper parameter search space to test multiple different models, feature engineered them, then retested to find the best model. He was enthusiastic about the experience, saying: “It’s an awesome contest! I learned so much about AI and modelling.  I’m looking forward to competing again next year.”   

Winners: 
Year - Team name - Team members 

1 Scarcity Squad - Isaac Slavens, Arianna Graham Laufer 

2 Recession Obsession - Marcus Asimis 

3 Marginal Revolutionaries - Daniel Buczakowski, Christopher McGee, Ayan 
Ahmed 

4 The Wage Wizards - Yannick Kidd, Rajan Gill, Neil Gawri  

Runners Up: 
Year - Team name - Team members 

2 The Equilibrium Enforcers - Boa Long Truon, Shelden Paolucci, Julian Zhang 

3 Utility Maximizers - Adam Baliat, Lucas Coulson, Feyi Opaleye 

4 Good Logic - Carson Boettinger, Nithin Kumar  

University awards that went to Economics students

Economics students also picked up a number of awards that are open to all Wilfrid Laurier students.  Mavis Sena Dotse, currently studying towards an MA in Business Economics at Laurier, was awarded the 2023-24 Nathan Eli John Leading with Purpose Award for her work in leading impactful humanitarian and social justice initiatives. Through The Dotse Foundation, a family-founded initiative in Ghana, she has spearheaded community-driven projects supporting orphans, youth, and widows, including donation drives and outreach programs across multiple cities. She has also volunteered with several organizations to organize creative events for street-involved youth and deliver essential supplies to underserved families.  She said, “Receiving this award serves as a reminder that work with a purpose, regardless of how far away it starts from campus, can inspire and resonate with people all across the world. It was also nice to be recognized at an event that celebrated all the amazing things economics students have been up to. Big shoutout to the department for putting together such a fun and encouraging space. That said, I’m still a little jealous I didn’t get to take home the trophy with Justin Smith’s head on it!”  

2024-25 University Award Winners 

Janice and Richard Reiner Award:  Aaron Rhee 

Matthew Graeme Smith Memorial Varsity Soccer Award:  Samir Ghouli 

The Deer Ridge Entrance Award:  Shawn Macias 

The Eileen Stumpf Award:  Cassidy Hirtle 

The Katherine Wong Mulholland: Award Russell Allen 

Urosevic Family Basketball Award: Dylan Brooks 

Waterloo Wellington CPA Ontario Association Award: Emily Myatt 

Wilfrid Laurier University Students' Union Award:  Zaynub Fasih; Sadaf Rasheed 

WLUSU Student Engagement Award: Luna Bashar  

2023-24 University Award Winners 

The Nathan Eli John, Leading with Purpose Award: Mavis Sena Dotse 

Westpoint Sport Scholarship: Cassidy Hirtle 

Ross and Doris Dixon Special Needs Volunteer Award: Yin Kelly Lee 

Rod Cleaver Memorial Scholarship: Suraj Rakesh 

Dr Morton Nelson Prize for Intermediate Accounting: Cassidy Hirtle 

Howard Teall Awards for Student Excellence – Undergraduate: Courtney Légère 
WLUSU Award: Abhay Ray Chaudhary

Bank of Canada Governor’s Challenge Team 

Finally, we were also able to congratulate our 2024-25 Bank of Canada Governor’s Challenge team, who made it to the finals in Ottawa.  This is the for the seventh time in the ten year history of the Challenge.  

Laurier students Kyle Arndt, Matyas Cseke, Lana El-Masry, Cheryl Li and Miraide Palmer, with analytical backing from Carson Boettinger and Charlie Fletcher, competed against fellow finalists from Université de Sherbrooke, University of Guelph, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa and Western University on Feb. 1 in Ottawa.

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