The Econometric Society has announced the winners of its Best Paper Award at the society's 2025 European Winter Meeting.

December 8, 2025 — At the 2025 European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society held from December 7 to 9 in Nicosia, Cyprus, the winners of the Best Paper Award have been announced:

Geraud Desazars, a current PhD Student at the Università Bocconi in Italy, was recognised for his paper on “Growing through capital”. 

The paper presents a general equilibrium framework to explain why large firms tend to be more capital-intensive than their competitors, highlighting their ability to adopt external innovations rather than creating innovations themselves. As capital costs decrease, firms with lower switching costs can adopt more capital-intensive technologies, thereby increasing market shares and markups, which in turn accounts for various economic phenomena such as rising markup dispersion and the divergence between sales and employment concentration.

Lavinia Kinne and Virginia Sondergeld of DIW Berlin were honored with their project, titled "Meet my family: women in leadership and gender stereotypes in the media," which addresses critical issues surrounding gender representation in leadership roles.

The authors conducted an analysis of media coverage regarding women on the executive and supervisory boards of DAX companies, reviewing approximately 45,000 newspaper articles from three prominent German daily newspapers. The findings reveal that media narratives about female and male board members are laden with gender stereotypes; coverage of female executives predominantly emphasizes family roles and caregiving, while male counterparts are portrayed as powerful leaders.

Moreover, Kinne and Sondergeld employed a survey experiment that illustrated how these stereotypical portrayals of female CEOs can significantly affect readers' expectations and financial decisions regarding the companies led by these executives.

Lavinia Kinne is a postdoctoral researcher in the Public Economics Department at DIW Berlin. Virginia Sondergeld is a former research associate and PhD student at DIW Berlin, who now works at Indeed Hiring Lab.

Kinne and Sondergeld were congratulated by DIW Berlin in an Announcement on the DIW website.

Both winning papers can be viewed on the Econometric Society website.

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_{^{Image Credits: diw.de (free for editorial use) / unibocconi.it / Virginia Sondergeld Personal Site}}