Robert Zymek
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zymek.bsky.social
Robert Zymek
@zymek.bsky.social
Senior Economist @IMFNews | Affiliate @CESifoNetwork | PhD @UPFBarcelona | Literally almost the last economist @repec_org | Research: trade & macro. Views: my own.
Reposted by Robert Zymek
Trade JMCs: Each year, I compile a list of international-trade job-market papers. To make sure you're on my list (& save me some work), please reply with your info in the following format:

Firstname Surname (School) - JMP title - homepageURL

[Spatial JMCs: reply to other post]
November 5, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
Nan Li, Sergii Meleshchuk, & @zymek.bsky.social introduce the new Bilateral Trade in Services (BiTS) database, which tracks services flows between countries over time and at the detailed sector level. They document a declining distance elasticity for services trade.
cepr.org/voxeu/column...
#EconSky
October 14, 2025 at 7:36 AM
📈IMF April WEO📉:
2025 global growth forecast would have been 3.2% pre-April 2 (down just 0.1 from January). It is 2.8% given the post-April 2 trade policy announcements. Even if all “tariff pauses” become permanent, global growth remains at 2.8% (but differently distributed across countries).
April 22, 2025 at 2:49 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
I stand corrected. The formula is not deficit/imports. The formula is surplus/(imports * ε * φ), where ε = -4 and φ = 0.25. That happens to equal deficits/imports.

ustr.gov/issue-areas/...

via @ericadyork.bsky.social
April 3, 2025 at 1:48 AM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
🚨New data alert!

A beta version of the Global Tariff Database is now available! 🔗https://feodorateti.github.io

🔎If you're looking for cross-country data on bilateral tariffs, this might help you.
March 11, 2025 at 5:34 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
1/ 📢 New paper alert! 📄 Together with Vitalii Tubdenov, we propose a measure of the "Average Period of Production" (APP) to capture the temporal dimension of production processes. It is inspired by Böhm-Bawerk’s capital theory.
February 13, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
Today marks the 180th anniversary of the birth of great Irish/Oxford economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth.

Most remembered now by students for the Edgeworth Box, he was the founding editor of the Economic Journal and is buried less than 400 feet from the Economics Dept with a beautiful Celtic cross.
February 8, 2025 at 8:16 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
Trade talks is back! Scientific insights on trade: tradetalkspodcast.com
Trade Talks
Trade Talks, with Chad P. Bown. A podcast about the economics of trade and policy.
tradetalkspodcast.com
February 8, 2025 at 3:11 PM
Nice chart by @chrisgiles.ft.com putting the scale of President Trump‘s tariff announcements in historical context. www.ft.com/content/c2e4...
February 4, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
The adverse effects of trade and globalization have become politically salient in a way that many of the other determinants of inequality have not. | Trade and Inequality | The IFS-Deaton Review | all open access | academic.oup.com/ooec/article...
Trade and globalization
Greater openness to international trade has had significant impacts on the structure of the UK and other advanced economies. The role that this greater ope
academic.oup.com
February 2, 2025 at 11:32 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
Modern supply chains don't look like trade theory 101!

They involve constant border crossings, each now hit by tariffs.

Tariffs raise prices, but the more important thing they do is disrupt supply relationships.

1/
February 2, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
New at JIE: "Changing global linkages: A new Cold War?" by Gita Gopinath, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas (@pgourinchas.bsky.social), Andrea F. Presbitero, Petia Topalova

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2024.104042
January 27, 2025 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
CALL FOR PAPERS!

What: Workshop on Growth, Trade and Geography
Where: BSE Summer Forum, Barcelona
When: June 10-11, 2025
Submission Deadline: February 28, 2025

events.bse.eu/live/files/5...

I hope to see many of you there!!! Please circulate!
events.bse.eu
January 22, 2025 at 11:16 AM
“That will require transformational reforms to lift productivity. In many countries, resources—including workers and capital—simply aren't flowing to the most dynamic firms, dragging average global productivity growth down by 0.6 percentage points annually.” www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
Opinion | To restore global growth, ease barriers for entrepreneurs
The United States leads the world in the efficiency of its economy. The world can catch up.
www.washingtonpost.com
January 17, 2025 at 5:49 PM
I used to teach the history of the gravity equation in trade - but was oblivious to the long history of gravity in urban/spatial economics (until I worked on gravity and the spread of Covid-19 with Ale Cuñat: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...)
January 13, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
Hello @bsky.app, here's to looking into more #bluesky and beyond... 😉
January 9, 2025 at 12:53 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
🚨New dataset alert 🚨Explore a large-scale survey of US respondents on how inflation has impacted them as consumers, workers, and asset holders. 📊 Includes rich open-ended responses and questions about emotions 👉
socialeconomicslab.org/research/pub...
January 6, 2025 at 2:50 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
Last Sunday Mario Draghi delivered a forceful speech, arguing that Europe has fallen into a vicious cycle of weak domestic demand, insufficient macroeconomic stimulus, depressed investment and low productivity growth cepr.org/system/files....

Here's a 🧵 on recent research related to this view.
December 19, 2024 at 3:19 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
Soaring Abuse of “National Security” Exceptions Has Wrecked the Multilateral Trading System

My latest CFR Geo-Graphics blog post . . .
on.cfr.org/3ZZRTc6
Soaring Abuse of “National Security” Exceptions Has Wrecked the Multilateral Trading System
Since 2019, there has been a massive surge in “National Security” notifications at the WTO. Many of these are covers for rank protectionism.
on.cfr.org
December 19, 2024 at 10:58 PM
What will be the economic impact if the EU pursues its goals for EV adoption and allows China to capture a big share of the EU car market? Jiaxiong Yao and I provide some answers in this F&D article: www.imf.org/en/Publicati... (non-technical; gory details here: www.imf.org/en/Publicati...)
December 3, 2024 at 10:05 PM
Back in Barcelona for a special occasion: the 30th anniversary of CREI @upfbarcelona.bsky.social 🎉 I owe a huge debt to the people here for teaching us, by example and with much patience, what good research in international economics can look like. We need it now more than ever!
November 26, 2024 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Robert Zymek
I am very excited about this paper we wrote with Jack Rossbach:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Trade Wars with Trade Deficits
Trade imbalances significantly alter the welfare implications of tariffs. Using an illustrative model, we show that trade deficits enhance a country's ability t
papers.ssrn.com
November 18, 2024 at 2:29 PM
By 2035, the European Union (EU) wants all new cars bought in its borders to be electric vehicles (EVs). But could rising EV imports from China pose a threat for the economy?

In new IMF research we quantify this tradeoff: imf.org/en/Publication…#EVsV#ElectricVehicleses
October 16, 2024 at 8:39 PM