I am an assistant professor in Princeton University's economics department.
My interests lie in international trade, public finance, and macroeconomics.
Please feel welcome to contact me at johnsbecko@gmail.com.
Here is my CV.
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.
Strategic (Dis)Integration (with Daniel O'Connor) January 2025.
Suppose a country anticipates that it may use trade as a point of leverage in future geopolitical conflicts. We study how should it develop domestic industries and international trading relationships today in order to strengthen its hand tomorrow.
Efficiency Criteria, Income Taxation, and Heterogeneous Elasticities (with André Sztutman) June 2025.
Revise and resubmit, American Economic Review
Taxes may be Pareto efficient but also utilitarian-suboptimal under all cardinalizations of utility that admit an upper bound on the curvature of utility in consumption. We provide a sufficient-statistics test for this possibility and show it holds in a panel of tax returns.
A World Trading System for Whom? Evidence from Global Tariffs
(with Rodrigo Adão, Arnaud Costinot, and Dave Donaldson) July 2024.
Global tariffs reveal the weights that nations implicitly place on the welfare of their trading partners relative to their own. Countries place positive weight on others—especially those that place higher weights on them—but fall short of global Pareto efficiency.
Why is Trade Not Free? A Revealed Preference Approach
(with Rodrigo Adão, 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.
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) June 2024.
Revise and resubmit, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
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.
Technological Change and the Cost of Redistribution (with André Sztutman and Anchi Xia) November 2024.
We study a sorting mechanism whereby wage increases raise the fiscal cost of redistributing income away from top earners. Estimates of the correlation of earnings elasticities out of tax and wage changes indicate this mechanism is quantitatively important.
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).
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]