Joint with the Deutsche Bundesbank, the Faculty of Economics and Business awards the best Bachelor's and Master's thesis in the field of monetary economics. For the summer term 2018, the chairs of Prof. Dr. Christian Klein (Corporate Finance) and Prof. Dr. Michaelis (Money, Credit and Currency) awarded Ines Jansen (Bachelor) and Simon Hildebrandt (Master) for the outstanding theses. Both have been supervised by the chair of Prof. Michaelis. 

Ines Jansen has investigated whether Distributed Ledger Technology can enhance cross-country payments. For this, Ines Jansen analyzes existing payment platforms and successor prototypes with a catalog of criteria developed in her Bachelor's thesis.

Simon Hildebrandt uses his Master's thesis to compare the Eurozone with the system of Bretton Woods. He asks whether TARGET2 balances between Eurozone countries are indicator, cause or stabilizer during an economic crisis in the Euro area. He finds a stabilizing mechanism in the short term by the unlimited capability to execute net payments between central banks in a fixed exchange rate regime, which leads to the possible creation of TARGET2 balances in the long run.