Paúl Elguezabal

Paúl Elguezabal is a Venezuelan politician and an aspiring scholar in development economics. He holds an economics bachelor from UCAB (Venezuela), a Master of Public Policy at George Mason University (USA), and a Master of Development Economics at George August University Göttingen (Germany).

Currently, Paúl is an external doctoral student in Göttingen supervised by Prof. Dr. Inmaculada Martínez-Zarzoso at the Ibero-America Institute of Economic Research and the Chair of Development Economics and Global Political Economy led by Prof. Dr. Andreas Fuchs.

He focuses his research on evaluating the regularization of migrants and its impact on future migration and remittances. He has worked on the relationship between migration and trade. Additionally, he assessed the determinants of asylum requests and recognition rates. Furthermore, he is also interested in the impact of remittances on the household of origin, SMEs and entrepreneurship as poverty alleviators, as well as on the impact of return migration. Paúl leads with Prof. Dr. Marcela Ibáñez-Díaz and Cäcilia Stapper the Iberoamerican Brown Bag Seminar at the University of Göttingen.

Publications
Nowak-Lehmann, F., Elguezabal, P., Martínez-Zarzoso, I., Cardozo Silva, A. R., & Frohnweiler, S. (2026). Asylum seekers’ response to political risk in their countries of origin: New evidence for asylum inflows to the OECD. Migration Studies, 14(3), mnag032.
DOI

Elguezabal, P., & Martínez-Zarzoso, I. (2026). RegMig database: Characterizing Regularization Programs in OECD Countries. Revista de Economía de ICE, (943).

Elguezabal, P., Martínez-Zarzoso, I., & Nowak-Lehmann, F. (2025). Immigration as a Trade Facilitator: A Review and New Insights. Cuadernos Económicos de ICE, (109). DOI

Ongoing Research
Elguezabal, P., & Martínez-Zarzoso, I. ( ). Do Regularization Programs Attract More Migrants? Evidence for OECD Countries.

Elguezabal, P., Martínez-Zarzoso, I., & Ahmed, J. ( ). The Impact of Migrant Regularization Programs on Remittance Flows.

Nowak-Lehmann, F., & Elguezabal, P. ( ). Are asylum decisions based on facts, or are they a policy tool used to control migration?

Elguezabal, P. ( ). Chavismo’s economic model. 1999-2024. How to swim in petrodollars and become impoverished.

Non-academic publications and interviews
Podcast “Ceteris Paribus” (University of Pennsylvania Initiative for the Study of Markets). August 2026.

Podcast “Tres preguntas” with Julio Borges. May 2026. Link

Elguezabal, P. (2026). Los migrantes venezolanos post-Maduro. Revista Democratización, (Special edition). Link