Libertad González, a professor in the Department of Economics and Business at UPF and the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE), was honoured as recipient of the 2024 Table of Change Award in recognition of her scientific contributions in the field of Economics. The award ceremony, organised by the Catalan Economic Society (SCE), a subsidiary of the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC), took place in the afternoon on 26 March, in the IEC’s Prat de la Riba Hall.

According to Libertad González, who collected the award from Ada Ferrer i Carbonell, president of the SCE, “this award means a lot to me, as after twenty years as a professor at Pompeu Fabra, such recognition makes me feel at home, that I’m part of the community as both an economist and an adopted member of Catalan society.”

Libertad González: “This award means a lot to me, as after twenty years as a professor at UPF, such recognition makes me feel at home, that I’m part of the community as both an economist and an adopted member of Catalan society”

Following the words of welcome from Ada Ferrer i Carbonell and the reading of the minutes by Elisenda Paluzie, the organisation’s secretary-treasurer, Libertad González delivered a lecture entitled “Why economists should study fertility, child development and gender inequalities”. During her intervention, the award-winner spoke about the issues on which her research has centred in recent years: the economic determinants of childbirth, early childhood development and human capital and gender inequalities in economics. In particular, she has explored how public policies affect these three dimensions, often in parallel, as well as the collateral or unexpected effects of certain policies.

The jury for the award was made up of economists Pol Antràs (president), Inés Macho-Stadler, Gerard Padró i Miquel, Climent Quintana-Domeque, Marta Reynal-Querol, Núria Rodríguez-Planas and Elisenda Paluzie (as non-voting secretary). In the minutes, the jury described Libertad González as “a researcher of great international prestige, with highly cited articles which enrich our understanding of the effects of economic factors and public policies on some of today’s key social challenges.”

The Table of Change Award, the winner of which receives €5,000 in prize money and a piece of commemorative artwork, is an annual award given to a researcher with a seniority of less than fifty years at a university or research centre in the Catalan linguistic domain, in recognition of their scientific contributions in any branch of Economics. Last year, the winner of the first edition of the award was Alberto Martín, a professor in the Department of Economics and Business at UPF and senior researcher at CREI.

Researcher with a major social impact and specialist in economics outreach

Libertad González holds a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University, in the United States. Since 2003, she has worked as a professor in the Department of Economics and Business at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and as an affiliated professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE).

Since 2020, her studies on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for families in Spain have had a major impact, examining aspects including changes in the distribution of paid and unpaid work between men and women in households with children and the effects of the 2020 lockdowns on births.

Between 2020 and 2023, she served as president of the association “Nada es Gratis”, which oversees the blog of the same name, one of the leading blogs on Economics in Spanish. She is a two-time recipient of the Government of Catalonia’s ICREA Academia Award and has also earned a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

In 2023, she served as president of the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE) and co-editor of the Journal of Demographic Economics. Note must also be made of her work training PhD students at UPF, where she has supervised some fifteen PhD theses.