I'm an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. My research interests focus on the effects of international trade and globalization on workers, consumers, and firms.
Department of Economics
University of Colorado Boulder
256 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0256
sergey dot nigai at colorado dot edu
Working Papers Highlights
In "International Transmission of Inequality through Trade" (R&R at AEJ: Economic Policy) I develop a theory of international consumer targeting to study how inequality shocks transmit across countries through the dispersion of export revenues. The figure on the left illustrates how the Gini coefficients would change if the international transmission of inequality was switched off.
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I quantify the extent of the international transmission of inequality through trade. Using firm-level and aggregate data, I find that (i) higher inequality in export markets increases the dispersion of export profits such that (ii) exporting to more unequal countries increases domestic inequality and (iii) trade magnifies the international transmission of domestic inequality shocks. I develop a model that rationalizes these empirical findings. The model relies on a novel theory of consumer targeting in which firms target and serve specific consumer segments in each market. Inequality in export markets shapes the distribution of firms' profits and, therefore, the incomes of individuals linked to them, in turn widening domestic inequality. I calibrate the model to 40 countries and show that international consumer targeting and inequality transmission explain 4.4% and 4.8% of the observed levels of the Gini coefficients and income shares of the top 1%, respectively. Inequality transmission through trade significantly magnifies the effects of globalization on income inequality.
In "Empirical Productivity Distributions and International Trade" (with Peter Egger and Katharina Erhardt) we use micro and macro data to recover country-sector non-parametric productivity distributions and study the role of comparative advantage in shaping trade when technology takes the form of productivity distributions across firms. The figure on the left illustrates recovered CDF's for 15 countries and 17 sectors.
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This paper reassesses the question of the importance of comparative advantage in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms where productivity is distributed nonparametrically. This assessment rests on a method of isolating empirical productivity distributions for 15 countries and 17 sectors using a combination of firm-level and macroeconomic data together with the structure of the model. In this setting, the effects of technology on trade are substantial and cannot be captured by a small set of technology parameters. On average, comparative advantage accounts for 23% of the observed variation in trade or 70% in the absence of selection effects.