Joakim Bratlie - winner of the MA thesis competition at Economics

"I'm humble to be here today and present my thesis to the faculty at the Department of Economics", says Joakim.

31.10.2014 - Astri Kamsvåg

Joakim Bratlie is the winner of the 2014 Master's thesis competition at the Department of Economics. 12 very good theses have been evaluated for the 2014 prize, and Joakim Bratlie was given the first price for his thesis "Price adjustments in Norway".

The jury's assessment of Joakim's thesis is:

Bratlies master thesis is an empirical study of price adjustment at the producer level over the period 2002 to 2009 in Norway. Bratlie uses detailed data on manufacturing, mining and quarrying in the mentioned period and presents results from the analysis of the frequency of price changes, the size of price changes and the duration of price spells.

This type of research has so far not been undertaken for Norway and is therefore novel. Besides having a general interest, the topic is interesting to macro economists dealing with questions related to price fluctuations over time. It is also interesting to labour economists who are interested in the demand of labour at the firm level, and responsiveness to nominal shocks.

The thesis is nicely structured and skilfully executed. The candidate shows a good understanding of the literature and chooses a nice language. We liked that the candidate also shows a good ability to critically use theory and methods and critically describe empirical results.

Joakim's supervisor was professor Øivind Anti Nilsen.

The committee assessing the MA theses submitted consists of Professor Erling Vårdal, Department of Economics at the University of Bergen, and Associate Professor Astrid Kunze, Department of Economics at NHH.

Download his thesis at Bora

Joakim Bratlie and Frode Steen.

Faculty at the Department of Economics.

Staff members at the Department of Economics

More staff at Economics.

Foto: Astri Kamsvåg