Trade Diversion

My coauthors and I posted a substantially revised draft of “Market Size and Trade in Medical Services” last week. As I wrote about the first draft: There’s a long-running discussion in health policy about “spatial mismatch”: are doctors and clinics too concentrated in big cities? Our paper emphasizes that you need to quantify the trade-off between local increasing returns and trade costs to answer this question. If the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market, the

Econometrica distributed the published version of Spatial Economics for Granular Settings in March. It’s relevant for anyone working with high-dimensional data like commuting flows, trade flows, or migration flows. Our main point is that spatial models calibrated to observed flows suffer overfitting problems in granular settings. Felix Tintelnot and I diagnose the problem, show data smoothing performs better, and introduce a finite model to quantify counterfactual uncertainty. We exami

Here’s a list of job-market candidates whose job-market papers fall within spatial economics, as defined by me quickly skimming webpages and two dozen candidates who responded on Twitter. I’m sure I missed folks, so please add them in the comments. Here’s a cloud of the words that appear in these papers’ titles: Yuanhang Yu (LSE) – Pollution Without Borders: Transboundary Air Pollution and the Geography of Pollutant Control Policy Po-Shyan Wu (Indiana) – Assault on the Low-Wage Econ

For the 16th year running, I’ve gathered a list of trade-related job-market papers. If I’ve missed someone, please contribute to the list in the comments. Here’s a cloud of the words that appear in these papers’ titles: Fanwen Zhu (UCLA) – Sanctions and Startups: Trade Shocks and Innovator Entrepreneurship in the U.S.-China Trade WarQi Zhang (Virginia) – Pollution Haven Next Door: Evidence from ChinaViktoriia Zezerova (Penn State) – Market Power, Misallocation, and Tra

Here’s a list of job-market candidates whose job-market papers fall within spatial economics, as defined by me quickly skimming webpages and 24 candidates who responded on Twitter. I’m sure I missed folks, so please add them in the comments. Here’s a cloud of the words that appear in these papers’ titles: Deepti Sikri (Albany) – The Fiscal Effects of Housing Prices: Evidence from School Districts Ozgen Kiribrahim-Sarikaya (Arizona State) – Place-Based Environmental Regulations and La

For the 15th year running, I’ve gathered a list of trade-related job-market papers. If I’ve missed someone, please contribute to the list in the comments. Here’s a cloud of the words that appear in these papers’ titles: Ernesto Ugolini (Aix-Marseille) – Varieties of Democracy and Preferences for Economic Integration Tingting Peng (Albany) – The Impact of Air Connectivity on Travel Trade: Evidence from Cross-border Card Payments Jiancong Liu (Bocconi) – Pro-Competitive Gains of

In January 2025, I will join Columbia University as a tenured Associate Professor of Economics. I’m happy to return to my alma mater. Since folks tend to underestimate the role luck plays in career outcomes, let me note a few critical junctures at which I benefited from good fortune. As an undergraduate student, I visited Oxford for six months. Most Oxford tutorials are taught by DPhil (PhD) students in the undergraduate’s college. Unknown reasons caused me to be assigned to a tutor

A number of trade economists are worried that PhD students have been losing interest in international trade. One way to measure interest in the field is to tally job-market papers, which I’ve been doing since 2010. The number of JMPs in international trade listed on my blog has grown over time, but the set of schools I cover has been expanding. When looking at the number of trade candidates produced by a fixed set of schools, I expected to find a substantial decline. I tallied the number o

I was in Malaysia this week for a family wedding. Five short observations: The story of Balassa and Samuelson, or at least the Penn effect that it aims to explain, is a reliable guide to relative prices. Non-traded services are relatively cheaper in Kuala Lumpur. Eat until you are stuffed. Automobiles compete in a global market, but the makes and models in KL differ from what I usually see on the road. Many vehicles were manufactured by Proton, Malaysia’s national car brand, which one does

Spatial economists use the word “amenity” in two imperfectly aligned ways. The first refers to place-specific services that are not explicitly transacted and hence do not directly appear in the budget constraint. The second refers to place-specific residuals because the researcher lacks relevant price or expenditure data. Sometimes these concepts are aligned, but they are far from synonymous. These inconsistent notions co-exist in part because the phrase “urban amenity&#8221

Here’s a list of job-market candidates whose job-market papers fall within spatial economics, as defined by me quickly skimming webpages. I’m sure I missed folks, so please add them in the comments. Here’s a cloud of the words that appear in these papers’ titles: Alaa Abdelfattah (UC Davis) – The Spillover Effect of Large Firms’ Entry on Wage Distribution and Skill DemandAlba Miñano-Mañero (CEMFI) – When are D-graded neighborhoods not degraded? Greening the legacy of r

For the 14th year running, I’ve gathered a list of trade-related job-market papers. If I’ve missed someone, please contribute to the list in the comments. Here’s a cloud of the words that appear in these papers’ titles: Agostina Brinatti (Michigan) – Third-Country Effects of U.S. Immigration PolicyAlbert Duodu (Lund) – Carbon offshoring and manufacturing cleanupAlejandra López Espino (Penn State) – Production Networks and Rules of Origin: NAFTA to USMCAAlejandra Martin