Reinhard Selten Award 2021

During the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik, Alina Kristin Bartscher was awarded the Reinhard Selten Prize (Young Author Best Paper Award) of the year 2021. Almuth Scholl (Head of the Program Commission 2021) praised the paper of the awardee as outstanding during the virtual meeting of the Association.

It Takes Two to Borrow: The Effects of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act on Homeownership and Mortgage Debt of Married Couples

In the U.S., until the 1970s, it was common to substantially discount the wife’s income in married couples’ mortgage applications. In 1974, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed that prohibited such type of gender discrimination. In her paper, Alina Kristin Bartscher employs this legislative change as a natural experiment to assess the economic importance of income-related credit constraints. In a convincing empirical and theoretical analysis, she shows that the relaxed credit constraints had a significant positive impact on the homeownership rate and female labor supply. The paper is an outstanding contribution and provides important insights on a question of great economic and social relevance.

Every year at its Annual Meeting, the Verein für Socialpolitik awards the Reinhard Selten Prize (Young Author Best Paper Award), worth €3,000, for papers that stand out in particular for their originality, significance of the research question and clean methodology. The award is named after Reinhard Selten, the only German-speaking Nobel laureate to-date in economics, who was honored for his work in the field of game theory - in particular his development of the concepts of subgame perfection and the “trembling”-hand perfect equilibrium.