Paul Elhorst wins the Jean Paelinck RSAI Award 2023

Professor of Spatial Econometrics Paul Elhorst has won the Jean Paelinck RSAI Award 2023. The award, presented by the Regional Science Association International (RSAI), recognizes and honors truly outstanding scholarly achievements of senior and internationally recognized regional scientists in the field of Regional Science Methods.

Paul Elhorst will receive the award at the conference of the European Regional Science Association (ERSA) in Alicante at the end of August. Apart from his professorship at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Elhorst is Fellow of the Spatial Econometrics Association and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Spatial Economic Analysis. During his 40-year academic career, he has maintained an active research and publication schedule. In the 1990s, his research activities focused on regional labor market analysis and then shifted increasingly to spatial econometric methods, with applications in a diversity of research areas such as economic growth, research productivity, regional tax competition, military spending, foreign direct investment and transport economics.

Innovative work on spatial panel models

Elhorst is known for his innovative work on spatial panel models. He has made a host of contributions to spatial panel data models, highlighted in his 2014 book Spatial Econometrics: From Cross-Sectional Data to Spatial Panels. Aside from its major themes, including static and dynamic spatial panel data models, Elhorst’s book bridges the gap between theoretical spatial econometricians and practitioners. The more than 2,000 Google citations this book has received clearly demonstrate the international impact of his research in enhancing the use of regional science methods to understand and interpret the spatial structure of economies.

The Jean Paelinck RSAI Award

The Jean Paelinck committee, made up of Geoffrey Hewings (Chair), Isabelle Thomas, Janet Kohlase, Juan Cuadrado-Roura, and Kieran Donaghy, hailed Elhorst as the winner of the 2023 edition of the Jean Paelinck RSAI Award. The award honors Jean Paelick, who is one of the four founding fellows of RSAI and who coined the term ‘Spatial Econometrics’ fifty years ago. The RSAI Council presents the award bi-annually; it is recognized as one of the highest honors bestowed by RSAI. The Jean Paelinck RSAI award recognizes how scholarly excellence is developed at an early stage in an academic career and how it is sustained creating a continuing contribution throughout the recipient’s career. The award celebrates that career and recognizes the attainment of outstanding scholarly excellence in contributing to innovation in the development of Regional Science Methods.