Oded Stark

Oded Stark, the economist who helped found the New Economics of Labor Migration and spent decades linking family strategy, risk and remittances to why people move, died on 8 August 2026. The Faculty of Economic Sciences at the University of Warsaw and the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at the University of Bonn announced his death in September, remembering a scholar whose books and more than a hundred journal articles reshaped development and population economics.

Stark held chairs and fellowships across Europe and the United States. He was Distinguished Fellow at ZEF in Bonn, Distinguished Professor at the University of Warsaw, and adjunct professor at the University of Tübingen. Earlier posts included Professor of Population and Economics and Director of the Migration and Development Programme at Harvard University, Chair in Development Economics at the University of Oslo, Honorary University Professor of Economics at the University of Vienna, University Professor (Chair in Economic and Regional Policy) at the University of Klagenfurt, and Distinguished Research Scholar at Georgetown University. He joined ZEF's fledgling doctoral programme as teacher and researcher in 1998; around 2000 the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Research Award deepened that Bonn tie. At Warsaw he belonged to the Department of Population Economics and Demography from 2005 and received an honorary doctorate in 2013. Poland also named him a Presidential Professor of Economics and honoured him with a Ministry of Science and Higher Education lifetime achievement award.

His research insisted that migration is not only a wage-gap calculation by a solitary worker. In the New Economics of Labor Migration, which he co-founded, households spread risk, ease credit constraints at home and invest in human capital through moves and transfers. Landmark books included "The Migration of Labor" (Blackwell, 1991/1993) and "Altruism and Beyond" (Cambridge University Press, 1995/1999). With Mark Rosenzweig he co-edited the "Handbook of Population and Family Economics". Later papers pressed into inequality, social stress, Gini measures and cooperative savings; ZEF noted that six days before his death he still submitted a paper, "Efficient Joint Savings Groups", to its series.

Colleagues remembered a generous mentor. At Warsaw he endowed the Professor Oded Stark Prize (from 2007) for outstanding publications by doctoral candidates and young doctors. At ZEF, students queued outside his office for advice. He is survived by family remembered in faculty and institute condolences. Exact birth details were not listed in the September 2026 memorials; what those notices fixed clearly was a global career that made the family, not only the individual, central to how economists understand migration.