Winners of the GDL Thesis Awards 2025

4 December 2025

As Global Data Lab we are proud to announce the 2025 GDL prize winners. Our BA prize winner is Bas Hollander. Our MA prize winner is Luna van Son. Congratulations. Very well deserved.

Bas’ BA thesis "Institutions to the rescue? Examining their moderating role in climate-induced migration" addresses the moderating role of institutions in climate-induced migration. Bas employs data from 86 middle-income countries between 2002 and 2019 to examine whether a country’s institutional quality moderates the relationship between rising temperatures and emigration. Using fixed effects and long-difference regressions his results show limited evidence that stronger institutions mitigate emigration responses to rising temperatures in lower-middle-income countries. Concomitantly, he identifies that this moderating role seems non-linear as it weakens under extreme temperatures.

Luna won the MA thesis prize with her thesis entitled “The Costs of Climate Change: The Effect of Rising Temperatures on Children’s Nutritional Status in India”. She researches the effect of rising temperatures on children’s nutritional status in India. Employing WAZ and other health-related data from NFHS-4 and NFHS-5 in combination with weather data (e.g. daily temperatures) from ERA5, also Luna to create a district-level panel with 467 districts across two survey waves. Using a binned temperature approach Luna’s results show that the null hypothesis, which states that rising temperatures negatively affect children’s nutritional status in India, cannot be rejected. Her research question and analysis are not only interesting but also very relevant from a policy point of view.

Do you find the research of our GDL prize winners inspiring? You might want to consider writing your thesis with the data provided by Global Data Lab of Radboud University.