Barlow Euro-Challenge are national finalists...

Left to right: Cara Krupnikoff-Salkin, Joseph Redmond, Elizabeth Hayman, EU Delegate Valerie Rouxel-Laxton, Moody’s Foundation President, Frances Laserson, Ambassador David O’Sullivan, Katherine Wright, Emma Thomas, Melani ZuckermanSix Joel Barlow High School students traveled to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York on a recent Tuesday and were national finalists in a national economics competition called the Euro-Challenge.

Sophomores Elizabeth Hayman, Melani Zuckerman, Katherine Wright and Cara Krupnikoff-Salkin and freshman Joseph Redmond were third place out of more than 100 American high school students competing in the Euro-Challenge.

The event tasks teams of three to five freshmen and sophomores to prepare a 15-minute presentation about growth, inflation, and unemployment in the Eurozone and then to make policy recommendations for how one particular member country should tackle its biggest economic problem.

After that, they face the greater challenge of taking unannounced questions from panels of expert judges, among them professors of economics and finance, Wall Street analysts and traders, financial journalists, European and American diplomats, and economists serving at the Federal Reserve Bank.

They knew the competition would be tough since their analysis would be compared with work from public and private high schools across the nation, including elite academies with specialization in economics and finance built into their names and institutional missions.

So since September, the team together with junior Euro-Challenge finalist emeritus Emma Thomas, sophomore Anderson Tittle, and coach Randall Smith studied unemployment in Slovakia and drafted a comprehensive set of fiscal and monetary policy prescriptions to deal with structural and cyclical unemployment.

Their talk dealt with a wide variety of technical policies like social benefit and tax reforms, minimum wage laws, reserve ratios, quantitative easing, negative interest rates, and targeted mobility schemes to match workers’ skills with existing opportunities. They also tackled thornier, social issues such as Romani integration, the skills gap in education, and the threat of a rising mainstream nazi movement.

Last month, the team traveled to the United Federation of Teachers building in New York City for a preliminary round of competition. Once they got the good news that they had advanced to semis, they worked to prepare for any questions they could think of.They returned to the city for the Euro-Challange, this time at various buildings owned by the New York Federal Reserve. In the morning they presented in the semi-final and shortly after lunch, they learned that they were one of the top five teams in the country and they’d get a shot to present a third time to the top tier of judges in the Fed’s large 12th floor lecture hall.

During the finals, the timekeeper had to repeatedly interject to end the conversation between judges and the Barlow team. After that, they took a walk through a beautiful New York spring afternoon to the World Trade Center for the awards ceremony.

The Euro-Challenge was sponsored by a number of partners including the European Commission, Credit Suisse, and organized by W!se.David O’Sullivan, ambassador to the EU Delegation to the U.S. andFrances Laserson, president of the Moody’s Foundation, presented Barlow with a $3,750 prize for their third-place finish.

This was Barlow’s greatest success to date in the Euro-Challenge. In 2010 and 2013, Barlow teams had advanced from the preliminary round to the top 20 semifinalists, but this was the first time a team had broken into the finals. As sophomores, four of the team members will age out of Euro-Challenge at the end of the school year, but they’re considering keeping the team together for the Fed Challenge next year.