Welcome to my home page. I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.

I am currently on the job market and will be available for interviews at the ASSA Annual meeting, January 3-5, 2010 in Atlanta.

Job Market Paper: "The Role of Trade in Structural Transformation" (pdf)

This paper examines the effects of international trade on structural transformation and economic growth. To do so, international trade is introduced into a two-sector neoclassical growth model. The two sectors are agriculture and the rest of the economy, and a key feature of the model is the low income elasticity of the agricultural good. In the closed economy model, as countries get richer, labor moves out of agriculture and into the other sector. International trade can accelerate this transition for countries with low agricultural productivity because it allows them to import food and reduce their agricultural production. The model is calibrated and then simulated for three different countries: the United States over the 20th century, the United Kingdom over the 19th century, and South Korea over the last 50 years. The results show that trade had large effects on structural transformation in the United Kingdom, and positive but smaller effects in South Korea. Agricultural production subsidies and agricultural import tariffs reduced the role of trade in South Korea. Without these policies, the volume of trade would have been larger, and the country would have experienced both a faster transformation and higher welfare.