Jana Holthöwer and Anastasiia Voloshyna win FEB Research Awards 2024 

The awards for best PhD thesis and best graduate of the research master were presented at the annual PhD conference held on April 8. Jana Holthöwer won the Best PhD Thesis Award 2024 for her thesis on how service robots shape service experiences in healthcare and beyond. Anastasiia Voloshyna won the Research Master Graduate Award for her thesis on the effect of Ukrainian refugees on local labour markets.

Best PhD Thesis Award 2024

Jana Holthöwer obtained her PhD degree in October 2024. Her thesis titled ‘Robots to the rescue? Shaping service experiences in healthcare and beyond' was supervised by Professor Jenny van Doorn and Professor Koert van Ittersum. In her thesis, Holthöwer focused on how consumers can be stimulated to be more accepting, satisfied of and compliant with service robots in frontline service settings, such as retail and healthcare. A relevant topic in this day and age of staff shortages. In order to ensure a successful integration of service robots the health realm, it is important to understand how robot characteristics and contextual factors can influence the service experience and enhance interactions with service robots. This is at the core of Holthöwer’s research and dissertation. With her work, she enriches our understanding of the integration of service robots in the healthcare sector. Holthöwer is currently an assistant professor at FEB’s Department of Marketing, where she continues to collaborate with Jenny van Doorn on research regarding consumer-based strategies, service technology, artificial intelligence and human-robot interaction.

Read more about Jana Holthöwer’s research.

Research Master Graduate Award 2024

Anastasiia Voloshyna graduated from the research master in Economics & Business in 2024 and is now working as a PhD candidate at FEB and the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health, and Data Science. Her master’s thesis ‘The effect of Ukrainian refugees on the local labour markets: the case of Czechia’ was supervised by Agnieszka Postepska and formed the basis for an article that was recently published in the Journal of Population Economics.

Following the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, Czechia emerged as a key destination for displaced Ukrainians, sheltering the highest per capita number of Ukrainian refugees worldwide. The swift enactment of the Lex Ukraine Act granted these refugees benefits typically reserved for permanent residents, such as unrestricted access to the labour market. This led to a notable increase in the number of Ukrainians officially employed, expanding Czechia’s workforce. In her thesis, Voloshyna uses individual micro-level data from sixteen waves of the Labour Force Sample Survey (LFSS), collected between the 1st quarter of 2019 and the 4th quarter of 2022, to examine the short-term impact of the influx of Ukrainian refugees on the labour market outcomes of locals in Czechia. Using several empirical strategies, including a two-way fixed effects model (TWFE), extensions to the canonical difference-in-differences (DiD) estimator, and matching on selective characteristics of individuals/districts and pre-treatment trends, she find consistent evidence that the influx of refugees had no economically meaningful impact on employment, unemployment, or inactivity rates within the local population, regardless of gender, educational level, or industry. 

Read the paper in the Journal of Population Economics.