LED Spotlight: Economics Department Awards Winter 2026 Undergraduate Research Prizes

The Department of Economics in the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University is happy to announce the winners of the winter 2026 Undergraduate Research Prizes.

The Department awards The Peter Sinclair Undergraduate Research Prize for research papers, typically those submitted to EC481, our capstone research project course.

This year’s Peter Sinclair Undergraduate Research Prize is awarded to Noelle Gray. In her paper “The Long Shadow of War: Historical Conflict Exposure and Institutional Trust in OECD Countries” Gray investigates whether exposure to large-scale conflict leaves a lasting impact on the level of institutional trust in a country. The author finds that longer conflict duration is positively associated with trust in political, civil society, and security institutions, though the effects are small in magnitude. The positive association between conflict and institutional trust becomes slightly stronger with age and in countries with greater conflict exposure. Trust increases modestly in political, civil, and security institutions, but remains unchanged for media and international institutions.

  
                                             Noelle Gray

This year’s Runners-up for the Peter Sinclair Undergraduate Research Prize are Neil Whiteside and Carter Richards. Whiteside’s paper “Beyond Macroeconomic Variables: The Predictive Power of Credit Spreads in Recession Forecasting” examines whether credit spreads are early and reliable indicators of economic recessions. Richards’ paper “Nuclear Power: The Future of Clean Energy?” investigates whether the share of nuclear power in a country’s energy mix has a statistically significant effect on wholesale electricity prices.

  
                               Neil Whiteside                                                     Carter Richards

“On behalf of the Economics Department, we would like to congratulate Noelle, Neil and Carter on their excellent research papers and we wish them every success in their careers,” said Associate Chair of the Department, Professor 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,” said Claus.

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