Title
Professor of Economics

Department
Dept of Economics


Email
andres@econ.berkeley.edu


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Research Expertise and Interest
international trade, economic growth, multinational production, technology diffusion

Research Description
My current research seeks to understand how countries gain from being open to the rest of the world. Such gains from openness take place through international trade, multinational production, and the diffusion of ideas. How large are the gains from openness for different countries and how important are these different channels in generating those gains? Answering these questions is valuable as countries work to deepen their economic integration with the rest of the world. Should countries focus on removing the remaining barriers to trade or should they pay much more attention to the elimination of the impediments to the inflow of foreign ideas through MP, licensing, or any other form? This is important for smaller countries, which arguably stand to gain much from their interactions with the rest of the world.
Openness is also important for the United States: what are the consequences of the increasing internationalization of production by U.S. firms on aggregate income as well as on different types of workers. By using their technologies abroad, U.S. firms can lower their costs, and this leads to a combination of higher profits and lower prices for domestic consumers. But this has a downside for U.S. production workers: production abroad by U.S. firms effectively generates competition for home-country workers, and this may lower wages in the U.S.