About Me

I have made numerous contributions to the theory of international trade and trade policy. See my curriculum vitae for details. Like most economists, I am a convinced liberal trader. For a discussion of why this is so despite sympathy for poor people who may be harmed by trade, see my essay for the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. In the last decade I have focused on index numbers of trade policy. (How high are trade barriers, understanding that there are thousands of them?) My book with Peter Neary (MIT Press, Dec. 2005) integrates and extends this work. Most recently I have focused on inference about other forms of trade barriers that are implicit in trade patterns. I am perhaps best known for the economic theory of gravity (AER, 1979). Multilateral resistance indexes capture the effect on bilateral trade of the partners' trade costs with all other parties. Applications resolve the border puzzle (why the US-Canada border appears so costly; AER, 2003) and the mystery of the missing globalization (why gravity coefficients are constant yet trade/GDP rises; NBER, 2008, AER forthcoming). A related line of research focuses on insecurity and its implicit effect on trade. (How much does predation, corruption and poor enforceability of contract limit trade? How do institutions evolve to enable and secure trade? How about terrorism?) Various papers in these lines of research are abstracted below and available for downloading from research downloads.

I currently serve on the Editorial Board of the Review of International Economics, and have served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of International Economics and the American Economic Review. I am a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and appear in Who's Who in Economcs, 3rd Edition. In 1999 I received a Boston College Distinguished Senior Research Award. In 2004 I was appointed William B. Neenan Millenium Professor of Economics at Boston College, the Economics Department's first endowed chair. In July 2009 I began a 3 year term as Department chair.

I enjoy tennis, running, biking and skiing, especially Nordic. In quieter moments of leisure I consume quantities of novels, biographies and histories. My current favorite recommendation as a mind-expanding book for anyone is Paul Seabright's The Company of Strangers . In the same big picture history line I also recommend Fernand Braudel's The Wheels of Commerce, William McNeill's The Rise of the West and Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches. For really big picture speculative fiction my favorite is Olaf Stapledon's classic Last and First Men.

As an undergraduate I thought of becoming an historian, a taste which survives in my occasionally teaching undergraduate economic history and will emerge someday in research.

My home page on the Economics Department website has more information, and other downloadable research and software. The Department website has many excellent and interesting links.