We are delighted to announce that PEDL grantees José Asturias, Manuel Garcia-Santana and Roberto Ramos have won the European Economic Association's 2020 Hicks-Tinbergen Medal for their paper, "Competition and the Welfare Gains from Transportation Infrastructure: Evidence from the Golden Quadrilateral of India". The medal is awarded biennially to the author(s) of an outstanding article published in the Association’s Journal during the two preceding years.
In announcing the winner, the EEA wrote:
"This paper provides major new insights on how to measure the welfare gains from infrastructure projects, decomposing these gains arising through a standard Ricardian channel, from those arising from improvements in allocative efficiency and markups terms of trade. The model is taken to the data to assess the welfare impacts of the Golden Quadrilateral project in India. Starting in 2001, within five years this provided nearly 6000km of modern highway connecting four major metropolitan areas (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Calcutta). The quantitative trade model shows 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 labor income, productive efficiency, and average markups impacting states' terms of trade. The paper elegantly combines theory with data to a highly policy relevant question, giving new emphasis to the role of firms and market power in determining gains and distributional consequences of large scale infrastructure investments."
José, Manuel and Roberto received a PEDL Exploratory Research Grant in 2013 for their project entitled "Transportation Costs and Regional Differences in Scale of Operation". We would like to warmly congratulate the three of them on their award.
A working paper of their article that featured in the Journal of the European Economic Association can be found here.
