Best PhD Paper Award

The Best PhD Paper Award honors the student with the most promising PhD paper presented at the occasion of the bi-annual sggö conference. The award is announced during the conference and endowed with CHF 1’000.

Eligibility

Applicants must be PhD students enrolled at a Swiss University at the time of the conference. Sole authorship will be given priority.

Application

The application includes a cover letter explaining the relevance of the paper and a PDF copy of the paper. Submissions must be sent electronically (deadline and contact details will be provided in advance of the next conference).

Criteria

The Awards Committee will select the paper that will likely make the greatest contribution to health economics. The paper’s contributions may be theoretical, empirical, or methodological.

Winner 2023

Fabienne Töngi, University of Bern: "The effect of potential out-of-pocket payments on drug prices and quantities".

The paper, co-authored by Christian Schmid and Michael Gerfin, examines the relationship between patient cost-sharing and drug prices as well as drug demand. It shows that pharmaceutical manufacturers decrease their prices by nearly 12 percent to avoid a higher co-insurance rate of 20%. However, consumers do not appear to be price sensitive, especially with respect to brand name drugs.