Assoc. Prof. Nitya Pandalai-Nayar

Gains from Trade and Immigration

Nitya Pandalai-Nayar is working on projects understanding the gains from trade and immigration, and the adaptation of trade and production to macroeconomic risk. The current era of stalling globalization and increasing geo-economic tensions warrant renewed focus on what are the gains from trade and migration, and how will firms and production respond to the increased macroeconomic risks worldwide. For instance, conventionally calibrated quantitative trade models typically imply very small gains from trade. Ms. Pandalai-Nayar shows that in a large class of dynamic trade models featuring adjustment mechanisms such as export entry and customer accumulation, the gains from trade are substantially larger than conventional models. The gains can be infinite in some cases, when the short-run adjustment to trade costs shocks is small. She is currently working on related topics including quantifying the gains from migration in a multi-region multi-sector trade model of the US economy, and understanding how firms’ supply chains and sourcing patterns adapt in response to macroeconomic risks, which can include climate risk and geopolitical risks. While at CES, she will give a lecture on “Supply Chains and Risk.”

Ms. Pandalai-Nayar works on topics in international trade and macroeconomics, including the formation of global supply chains and their impact on global synchronization, the transmission of shocks across countries, the adaptation of economies to climate risk, and the employment impacts of trade. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review and the Review of Economic Studies. Ms. Pandalai-Nayar is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an associate editor of the Journal of International Economics and the IMF Economic Review. She co-founded the annual Women in International Economics Conference, and co-organized the first four sessions.

Nitya Pandalai-Nayar is an Associate Professor of Economics at The University of Texas at Austin and co-Director of the Empirical Macroeconomics Policy Center of Texas (EMPCT). She received a BA in Economics and Mathematics from Wellesley College, an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and a PhD from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, followed by the International Economics Section post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton.