This is course is co-organized with

Instructors

Pol Antràs (Harvard University)

Dates

24-28 August 2026

Hours

9:30 to 13:00 CEST

Format

In person

Practical Classes

No, but an optional problem set may be offered.

Intended for

Academics, researchers, practitioners, and graduate students interested in international economics.

Prerequisites

First-year Master or PhD level in international economics.

Overview

This short course will focus on the study of multinational firm activity with a special emphasis on global value chain (GVC) activity. I will discuss theoretical and empirical approaches as well as “micro” and “macro” approaches to the study of GVCs. On the empirical front, I will begin reviewing several variants of the “macro approach” to measuring the relevance of GVCs in the world economy, and I will also offer a critical evaluation of the country- and industry-level datasets (or World Input Output Tables) that have been used to date. I will next discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a burgeoning alternative “micro approach” that has instead employed firm-level datasets to document the ways in which firms have sliced up their value chains across countries. On the theoretical front, I will propose an analogous dissection of the literature. First, I will review a vast body of work developing country- and industry-level quantitative frameworks that are easily calibrated with World Input Output Tables, and that open the door for counterfactual exercises with minimal demands on estimation. Second, I will overview micro-level frameworks that have treated firms rather than countries or industries as the relevant unit of analysis, and that have unveiled a number of distinctive mechanisms by which GVCs shape the determinants and consequences of international trade flows in ways distinct from traditional models of international trade. I will close the lecture with a discussion of a still infant literature on the desirability and effects of trade policy in a world of GVCs. The substance of the course will be applied to understanding the recent drastic changes in the global landscape.

Topics

• Measuring global production sharing in the world economy via World Input-Output Tables
• Firm-level empirical approaches to GVC participation
• GVC and quantitative trade theory. The view from Macro
• Micro-level approaches to modelling GVCs
• GVCs and trade and industrial policy
• The Future of Globalization

Pol Antràs is Robert G. Ory Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2003. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). He served as Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics from 2015 until 2020, having previously been on the editorial board of the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of International Economics, and the Annual Review of Economics, among other journals. He is a member of the Scientific Council of the Barcelona School of Economics. Among other distinctions, he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2007 and the Fundación Banco Herrero Prize in 2009, and he was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2015, and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024. A citizen of Spain, Antràs received his BA and MSc in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003.