James Markusen

My principal interests are in the field of international trade. My research for the last 25 years has concentrated on the location, production, and welfare effects of large-scale firms and multinational corporations. I have worked on analytical models, numerical simulation models, and empirical estimation. Many years of work researching multinational firms culminated in a book on the role of multinationals in the international economy, and was published by the MIT press in the summer of 2002. While continuing to work on multinationals and the non-rivaled and non-excludable properties of knowledge capital in particular, I have more recently worked on a diverse set of issues including export-platform foreign direct investment, fragmentation and trade at the extensive margin, and selection and learning effects in multinational firms explaining their higher wages. My most recent work focuses on non-homothetic preferences and explores the role of income elasticities in explaining empirical and policy puzzles.