The jury members, Klaus Desmet, Luisa Fuster, and Maia Güell decided to grant the 2020 Award to an outstanding research Contribution published in SERIEs – Journal of the Spanish Economic Association to Joan Llull for his article:
“Understanding international migration: evidence from a new dataset of bilateral stocks (1960–2000)”, SERIEs 7, pp 221-255, August 2016.
The jury considers that:
“This is a novel and careful study that improves our understanding of the determinants of migration flows. The paper makes several contributions. First, using data from the National Statistics Office from 24 OECD countries it constructs a new data set on bilateral migrant stocks with information on immigrants from 188 countries. Second, it develops an empirical methodology to estimate gravity-style equations in the presence of grouped data, avoiding the biases introduced by conventional empirical strategies based on imputations. Third, using the novel data set and methodology, the paper finds evidence that the expected income gains of prospective migrants have heterogeneous effects on the composition of migrants by country of origin, as migration responses depend critically on the distance between the sending and receiving country. These results have profound implications for the design of immigration policies.”
