Publications and Forthcoming

A Theory of Economic Sanctions as Terms-of-Trade Manipulation  July 2024.  Journal of International Economics

How can a country impose a given economic cost on a trading partner at the least cost to itself? I show that trade taxes as sanctions target the same goods as trade taxes as terms-of-trade manipulation. This observation has several useful policy implications.

How Should Sanctions Account for Bystander Countries?  May 2023.  AEA Papers & Proceedings

I consider the design of trade sanctions in the presence of neutral third parties. Counterintuitively, goods a sanctioner can trade with a bystander should face weaker sanctions. The sanctionee-bystander case depends on whether one fixes total or residual elasticities.

Working papers

Strategic (Dis)Integration  (with Daniel O'Connor)  March 2024. 

Suppose a country anticipates that it may use trade as a bargaining chip in future geopolitical conflicts. We study how should it develop domestic industries and international trading relationships today in order to strengthen its hand tomorrow.

Why is Trade Not Free? A Revealed Preference Approach  (with Rodrigo Adao,  Arnaud Costinot, and Dave Donaldson) 

October 2023.  Online Supplement

We develop a methodology that uncovers the redistributive preferences implicit in trade policy. This approach implies that redistribution across sectors explains a large share of the variation in US tariffs; redistribution across states plays a much smaller role.

Income Taxation with Elasticity Heterogeneity  (with André Sztutman)  August 2023.  Appendix  Supplementary Appendix

We consider the under-studied second-order condition of a standard non-linear income taxation problem, using it to formulate a welfare-neutral test for efficient redistribution. Under our estimates of heterogeneity in taxable income elasticities, the test fails.

How to Fix a Coordination Failure: A 'Super-Pigouvian' Approach  January 2023.

Standard Pigouvian policy can fall prey to coordination failures. I propose a 'super-Pigouvian' policy that retains the decentralized spirit of Pigouvian policy while also resolving coordination failures. I estimate its effects in an application to 1970s South Korea.

Fiscal Policy in a Networked Economy  (with Joel Flynn and Christina Patterson)  December 2023.

How do supply chain, regional, employer-employee, and consumption relationships affect fiscal policy's impact and its optimal targeting? We find that the structure of these linkages shapes the distributional—but not the aggregate—effects of fiscal policy.

Works in progress

A World Trading System for Whom? Evidence from Global Tariffs  (with Rodrigo Adao,  Arnaud Costinot, and Dave Donaldson) 

Tariffs reveal to what extent countries internalize effects on each other's welfare. We find that countries take each other into account, but fall short of Pareto efficiency. Countries place higher weight on those who place higher weight on them—a form of reciprocity.

Non-Substitution: A Modern Treatment (available upon request)

When do factor prices determine goods prices and/or input-output structure? This short note provides a modern treatment of the non-substitution theorem first introduced by Samuelson (1949). 

Policy writing

The Simple Economics of Optimal Sanctions: The Case of EU-Russia Energy Trade  (with Kai Menzel and Jan Schmitz)  April 2022.

We study trade EU-Russia sanctions and account for tariffs' effects on both countries' terms of trade with the rest of the world. Our main result is a simple test for when tariffs on Russian energy imports simultaneously raise EU welfare and lower Russian welfare.

The Simple Economics of Trade Sanctions on Russia: A Policymaker's Guide  April 2022.

What economic tradeoffs should inform the design of trade sanctions? This paper—intended as a guide for policymakers with some background in economics—uses supply and demand diagrams to illustrate seven simple lessons. [Press: VoxEU]