Assist. Prof. Ken Kikkawa, Ph.D.

Production Networks

During his visit to CES, Ken Kikkawa will deliver CES Lectures on Topics in Production Networks, an area he has been actively working on. He will discuss recent developments in the literature, including models on how firms form network relationships with other firms and how firms price their output depending on who they sell to.

He will also examine how bilateral prices in firm-to-firm relationships respond to exogenous price changes of other firm pairs. These cross-price elasticities are important as they help delineate market boundaries. In a model of bilateral price bargaining, if firms can switch suppliers costlessly, the cross-price elasticities are independent of whether firms share the same buyer. In such instances, market boundaries align with product definitions. However, if firms cannot switch suppliers due to prohibitively high switching costs, positive cross-price elasticities occur only among firms that share the same buyer, leading to a market definition significantly narrower than the product boundary. He plants to calculate these cross-price elasticities across various industries and examine the broader implications of differing market definitions.

Mr. Kikkawa is a trade economist with interests in international trade and industrial organization. His papers use combinations of micro-data and structural estimation methods to study the micro-structures of firms’ operation and competition environment.

Ken Kikkawa is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business. He is also an NBER Faculty Research Fellow, and an Affiliate of the CESifo Research Network. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2018. Before joining UBC Sauder, he worked briefly as a research economist at the National Bank of Belgium.