Inaugural Dunlop undergraduate thesis prize is awarded

The Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government (M-RCBG) at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government recently announced that Pablo M. Tsutsumi ’07 is the winner of the first John T. Dunlop Prize in Business and Government. Tsutsumi won the prize for his thesis titled “Domestic Intentions: International Repercussions: An Empirical Study on the Impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on Latin American ADRs.”

The prize is awarded to the graduating senior who writes the best thesis on a challenging public policy issue at the interface of business and government. It carries a $500 award.

“The business-government relationship affects daily life: from the regulation of pension and health systems to public-private partnerships in energy generation and information-technology systems,” said Professor John Ruggie, the Weil Director of M-RCBG. “The John T. Dunlop thesis prize allows us to encourage a new generation of thinkers and doers to delve deeply on these issues and explore ways of maximizing public value in the complex interplay of the public and private sectors.”

Elina Tetelbaum ’07, meanwhile, earned an honorable mention for her thesis titled “A Sobering Look at How Minimum Legal Drinking Age Laws Affect Traffic Fatalities.”

The prize is named after Lamont University Professor Emeritus John T. Dunlop, a widely respected labor economist who served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1973. An adviser to many U.S. presidents, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dunlop was secretary of labor under Gerald Ford.

In addition to serving as secretary of labor, Dunlop held many other government posts, including director of the Cost of Living Council, chair of the Massachusetts Joint Labor-Management Committee for Municipal Police and Firefighters, and chair of the Commission on Migratory Farm Labor.

Dunlop, who died in 2003, served as the second director of the Center for Business and Government from 1987 to 1991. The center, renamed the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government in 2005, focuses on policy issues at the intersection of business and government.