M-RCBG awards John T. Dunlop Undergraduate Thesis Prize to Bona Yoo

The Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government (M-RCBG) at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is pleased to announce the 2026 winner of the John T. Dunlop Undergraduate Thesis Prize in Business and Government.  
 
Bona Yoo has won for her thesis, “Disturbing Facts and Ominous Danger Signals: A Modern-Day Revisitation of Triffin’s Paradox Through Global Dollar Reserve Demand and US External Deficits.” She is graduating from Harvard College this week with an A.B. in Economics.
 
The John T. Dunlop Thesis Prize in Business and Government is awarded to graduating seniors who write the best thesis on a challenging public policy issue at the interface of business and government. The prize carries a $2,000 award.
 
This year’s winning thesis by Yoo explores the persistence of the modern-day Triffin mechanism — by which foreign official demand for dollar reserves outpaces U.S. fiscal capacity. Her research finds that implications are two-fold: first, the empirical contours of the Triffin mechanism persist and, if anything, have grown more acute. More remarkably, these indicators have been masked by a structural shift in foreign official portfolios away from debt instruments and toward U.S. equities, a phenomenon directly connected to the reversal of U.S. exorbitant privilege.
 
In explaining why the center chose to award the John Dunlop Prize to Yoo this year, M-RCBG Director Jason Furman said, “Bona Yoo has produced an extraordinary piece of scholarship that convincingly overturns the conventional wisdom on a fundamental question in international economic policy. She shows that the Triffin Paradox is alive and well — except instead of the dollar being reliant on demand for Treasuries it is not reliant on demands for equities. That leaves the stability of the dollar increasingly dependent on the performance of a handful of U.S. firms.

“Yoo’s combination of careful econometrics and attentiveness to policy is precisely what John Dunlop valued — we are thrilled to award her the Dunlop Prize,” Furman added.