Isabella Waldorf, alumna of the "Politics & Technology" degree program, received the third prize of the Heureka Student Award at Heureka'24 in Stuttgart.
The Heureka Foundation for Environment and Mobility honors outstanding Master's theses that address issues in mobility in conjunction with environmental aspects or the application of optimization methods.
Isabella's master's thesis, "Mobility for Whom? Evaluating the 9 EUR-Ticket from a Mobility Justice Perspective," was written as part of the Mobilität. Prof. Stefan Wurster supervised the Leben project.
In her work, Isabella employed propensity score matching, a method from the causal inference literature, to estimate the effect of the 9 EUR ticket on marginalized groups. She considered various indicators, including participation in activities, use of public transportation, and financial assistance.
Isabella is now a research assistant at the Chair of Traffic Engineering and Control at the Technical University of Munich, where she is pursuing a PhD on the decarbonization of commuter traffic, incorporating behavioral economics research into her studies.