Albert Jan Hummel receives cum laude distinction on his PhD thesis

The motion to award Albert Jan with the cum laude distinction was initiated by doctoral dissertation supervisor Bas Jacobs, Professor of Public Economics at Erasmus School of Economics. Jacobs: ‘Albert Jan’s PhD thesis is extremely skilled, highly mature and of superior academic quality. He has developed as an outstanding public finance and labour theorist and shows an impressive creativity and analytical elegance in doing economic theory. Albert Jan also has a razor sharp economic intuition and show great skills in conveying the economic insights from his research. He has truly deserved his cum laude distinction, mainly through sheer academic virtuosity, but also quite a bit of work, great character and complete dedication to his research.’

In his PhD thesis “Tax Policy in Imperfect Labor Markets”, Albert Jan Hummel tries to answer the question how the government can use taxes to improve welfare, taking into account that the labor market differs substantially from benchmark of perfect competition. For Hummel it is a great honor to receiving the cum laude distinction: ‘It completely caught me by surprise. I was of course thrilled to hear the committee members were so positive and unanimous in their decision. For quite some time, I was worried whether the physical defense could take place. But everything turned out much better than I could have hoped for!’

Albert Jan graduated from the Tinbergen Institute research master programme in 2015 (cum laude), after which he started a PhD under supervision of Professor Bas Jacobs of Erasmus School of Economics. Currently Albert Jan works as an assistant professor in Economics at the Macro and International Economics Research group at the University of Amsterdam.