Julius Ilciukas wins best PhD paper award at the 5th Baltic Economic Conference

This year the conference took place in Riga, Latvia, organized by the Baltic Economic Association, in cooperation with the Bank of Latvia and the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. The conference program included almost 60 papers on topics of Firms, Trade, Labor, Central Banking, Public Economics, Political Economy, Gender Economics, Trust and tax morale, Consumer's choice, Energy Macro, and a keynote delivered by Beata Javorcik (EBRD's Chief Economist, Professor at the University of Oxford).

The conference builds upon the annual meeting of the Lithuanian Economics Network, started in 2012. From 2021, the Baltic Economic Association organizes a competition for the best paper presented by a PhD student at the Baltic Economic Conference. The candidates for the award are not limited to the Baltic region (neither in terms of institution nor nationality).

This year's best paper has been decided by the jury, consisting of the representatives of SSE Riga and the Bank of Latvia, the Bank of Lithuania, the Bank of Estonia and Tallinn University of Technology. It was unanimously awarded to Julius Ilciukas for his paper on "Fertility and Parental Retirement”. The paper studies how reduced retirement opportunities in one generation affect fertility in the subsequent generation. It shows that women whose mothers were affected by the 2006 pension reform had fewer children, which suggests that delaying parents’ retirement can reduce their adult children’s fertility.

Julius Ilciukas is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Amsterdam under supervision of research fellows Erik Plug (University of Amsterdam) and Bas van der Klaauw (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). He is especially interested in empirical microeconomics with a focus on labor and family economics. Julius graduated from Tinbergen Institute’s research master in 2020.