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Best theses awarded

Photo of award winners and supervisors © Annika Buscha
Pictured are the award winners Constantin Mennes (far left), Benjamin Y. Koch (center left), Gina Dietterich and Anna Fenja Tautz (1st and 2nd from right), and sponsor Steffen Leininger (center right) as well as the supervising professors Lorenz Graf Vlachy, Christiane Pott (2nd and 3rd from left) and Andreas Hoffjan (2nd from right in the back). Not pictured is sponsor Christian Lützenrath.
In January, TMC Turnaround Management Consult honored the best theses at the Department of Economics at TU Dortmund University. The selection was made for Bachelor graduates Constantin Mennes and Anna Fenja Tautz as well as Master graduates Gina Dietterich and Benjamin Y. Koch. The award winners were selected from all students who wrote their final thesis at TU Dortmund University's Department of Business and Economics in the 2023/2024 academic year. The award comes with prize money of €1,000 donated by the TMC.

TMC is a leading consultancy firm for restructuring and reorganization consulting, insolvency-related consulting and interim management for SMEs. It would like to use the award to promote talent and support qualifications in the field of business at TU Dortmund University. The supervising professors Lorenz Graf Vlachy (Strategic Management and Leadership), Christiane Hellmanzik (Urban, Regional and International Economics), Andreas Hoffjan (Management Accounting and Control) and Christiane Pott (International Accounting and Auditing) are delighted with the award winners.

The award-winning theses covered a broad spectrum of issues in business administration and economics.

Constantin Mennes examined the importance of emotional intelligence in management in his Bachelor's thesis. Specifically, he analyzed how the emotional intelligence of managers affects different leadership styles as well as employee and company results. The bachelor's thesis provides an overview of the central scientific work in this field of research and emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership.

Anna Fenja Tautz examined the effects of the IFRS draft standard ED/2021/1 "Regulatory Assets and Regulatory Liabilities" in her bachelor thesis using the example of a transmission system operator. Her conclusion: With the help of the proposed accounting model, the special features of price-regulated markets can be depicted more accurately from an economic perspective and investors can be provided with relevant, useful information for their decisions. This is of great importance in view of the financing requirements in the context of the energy transition.

The master's thesis written by Gina Dietterich is dedicated to the development of a risk report using the example of a differential balancing group of the distribution grid operator Westnetz. In addition, possible risk minimization measures for this were identified. The central risk factors are price deviations between the management and the remuneration mechanisms. Machine learning methods are a suitable approach for minimization.

Benjamin Y. Koch provided empirical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa in his master's thesis on the geo-economic impact of the Russian Wagner Group. His results show that Wagner reinforces the growth-inhibiting dynamics of conflicts. The group increases the likelihood of sexualized violence against women and large-scale civil conflict. Its counter-terrorism strategies prove to be ineffective.