MOBILE - Mobility Law Open Lab with Tobias Grohmann

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The Effect of Free Movement on International Migration and Mobilities in South America

Presenter

Tobias Grohmann is a Research Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. His research focuses on the economics and political economy of global migration and mobility, with direct links to economic development, globalization, trade, inequality, and policy. At EUI, he contributes to the Global Mobilities Project and the MIGMOBS ERC AdG project, where we curate and analyze global datasets on all forms of human mobility.  

Presentation

During the Seminar, Tobias will present a current working paper, co-authored with Natalia Debandi and Ana Paula Penchaszadeh (both UNSAM, Argentina), titled “The Effect of Free Movement on International Migration and Mobilities in South America.” Beginning with several free movement regimes (FMRs) initiated by Argentina in the late 1990s, FMRs have expanded across the region. It remains underexplored how these bi- and multilateral agreements have affected migration and mobility flows since their implementation. We distinguish between migration—movement plus settlement—and visitor mobility—movement without settlement—to test for substitution effects between modes of mobility. The paper implements a staggered difference‑in‑differences design in a panel featuring data from the Freemove Database (Acosta and van der Baaren, 2024), the Global Transnational Mobilities Dataset 2.0 (Grohmann, Recchi, and Bernasconi, 2026), and migration flow estimates from a deep-learning network model (Gaskin and Abel, 2025). Results show that, on average, migratory mobility decreases following the entry into force of an FMR, while there is no effect on visitor mobility. This suggests that people may refrain from migrating when other modes of mobility become available.

Time: 16 April 2026 14:00-15:15

Place: MOBILE – 6B-2-22 Southern Campus + ONLINE

Online participation

For online participation, please contact MOBILE's Student Assistant Kamille at xdm242@jur.ku.dk to receive a Zoom link.