RSAI has the great pleasure to announce that the jury consisting of  Janice Madden, Carlos Azzoni and Erik Verhoef chose the articles:

Tobias D. Ketterer and Andrés Rodríguez‐Pose, Institutions vs. ‘first-nature’ geography: What drives economic growth in Europe's regions?, published in Volume 97, Issue S1, March 2018, Pages S25-S62;

Motivation: Through an elegant scientific approach, the paper aims to investigate whether differences in institutional and ‘first nature’ geographical conditions have affected economic growth in Europe’s regions in the period 1995–2009. The analysis lies on a newly developed dataset including regional quality of government indicators and geographical characteristics, and arrives to the conclusion that regional institutional conditions – and, particularly, government effectiveness and the fight against corruption – play an important role in shaping regional economic growth prospects.

and

Wen Chen,  Bart Los,  Philip McCann,  Raquel Ortega‐Argilés,  Mark Thissen and Frank van Oort, The continental divide? Economic exposure to Brexit in regions and countries on both sides of The Channel, published in Volume97, Issue1, Special Issue: The trade, geography and regional implications of Brexit, March 2018, Pages 25-54,

Motivation: The paper tackles an important topic like Brexit, and studies the degree to which EU regions and countries are exposed to negative trade‐related consequences of Brexit. We develop an index of this exposure, which incorporates all effects due to geographically fragmented production processes within the UK, the EU and beyond. The paper demonstrates that UK regions are far more exposed than regions in other countries and that this imbalance may influence the outcomes of the negotiations between the UK and the EU.

as the winners of the Martin Beckmann Prize as the best paper published in Papers in Regional Science in 2018.