UBS Center Seminar

Sep
19

Intro

The UBS Center Seminar is an academic seminar series that features presentations from renowned international researchers.

Kiminori Matsuyama's research interests concern international trade and economic growth and development. He is particularly interested in understanding the mechanisms behind macroeconomic instability, structural transformation, as well as inequality across countries, regions, and households. He is a Fellow of Econometric Society. He was the 1996 winner of the Nakahara Prize awarded to the best young economist by the Japanese Economic Association. He currently serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies.

Lecture title

Engel’s Law in the Global Economy: Demand-Induced Patterns of Structural Change, Innovation, and Trade

Abstract

Endogenous demand composition across sectors due to nonhomothetic demand, or Engel’s Law for the brevity, affects i) sectoral compositions in employment and in value-added, ii) variations in innovation rates and in productivity change across sectors, iii) intersectoral patterns of trade across countries; and iv) migration of industries from rich to poor countries. Using a two-country model of directed technical change with a continuum of sectors under nonhomothetic preferences, which is rich enough to capture all these effects as well as their interactions, this paper offers a unifying perspective on how economic growth and globalization affects the patterns of structural change, innovation and trade across countries and across sectors in the presence of Engel’s Law. Among the main messages is that globalization amplifies, instead of reducing, the power of endogenous domestic demand composition differences as a driver of structural change.

The UBS Center Seminar is an academic seminar series that features presentations from renowned international researchers.

Kiminori Matsuyama's research interests concern international trade and economic growth and development. He is particularly interested in understanding the mechanisms behind macroeconomic instability, structural transformation, as well as inequality across countries, regions, and households. He is a Fellow of Econometric Society. He was the 1996 winner of the Nakahara Prize awarded to the best young economist by the Japanese Economic Association. He currently serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies.

Department of Economics, University of Zurich
Department of Economics, University of Zurich

Speakers

Professor of Economics at the Northwestern University
Prof. Kiminori Matsuyama

Kiminori Matsuyama's research interests concern international trade and economic growth and development. He is particularly interested in understanding the mechanisms behind macroeconomic instability, structural transformation, as well as inequality across countries, regions, and households. He is a Fellow of Econometric Society. He was the 1996 winner of the Nakahara Prize awarded to the best young economist by the Japanese Economic Association. He currently serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies.

Professor of Economics at the Northwestern University
Prof. Kiminori Matsuyama

Kiminori Matsuyama's research interests concern international trade and economic growth and development. He is particularly interested in understanding the mechanisms behind macroeconomic instability, structural transformation, as well as inequality across countries, regions, and households. He is a Fellow of Econometric Society. He was the 1996 winner of the Nakahara Prize awarded to the best young economist by the Japanese Economic Association. He currently serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies.

Venue

University of Zurich

Department of Economics, SOF-G-21, Schönberggasse 1, 8001 Zürich
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