Research paper co-authored by Manuel García-Santana wins 2020 Hicks-Tinbergen Award
On 7 April the European Economic Association (EEA) announced that UPF Prof. Manuel García-Santana and two co-authors had been awarded the Hicks-Tinbergen Award for best paper published in the last two years in the EEA's Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA). The award will be presented at the next annual EEA Congress, scheduled for August 2020 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Prof. García-Santana is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the UPF. The paper was co-authored with Jose Asturias, Assistant Professor of Economics at Georgetown University in Qatar, and Roberto Ramos, Economist at the Public Sector and Fiscal Policy Unit of the Bank of Spain.
The winning paper is titled "Competition and the Welfare Gains from Transportation Infrastructure: Evidence from the Golden Quadrilateral of India", and investigates the effects of the "Golden Quadrilateral", a national infrastructure project in India completed in 2012 which connects the country's four major metro cities via 5,846 kilometres of highway.
The researchers studied the project using a model of internal trade with variable markups. Novel to their approach, the model incorporated several channels through which transportation infrastructure affects welfare. In particular, the model accounts for gains stemming from improvements in the allocative efficiency of the economy. The paper found that the infrastructure project led to real income gains of 2.7%, with allocative efficiency accounting for 7.4% of the gains, with the remaining welfare gains being accounted for by changes in labour income, productive efficiency, and average markups impacting states' terms of trade.
The Hicks-Tinbergen Award is a biennial prize in economics awarded by the EEA to the author(s) of the best article published in the JEEA within the two preceding years. The Hicks-Tinbergen Award was created in 1991 and is named in honour of the Dutch econometrician Jan Tinbergen and the British economist John Hicks to show that the EEA supports both theoretical and empirical economic research in Europe.
Find out more about the paper's authors on their personal websites: