Yuting Wei

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics and Finance at Bocconi University. My research is in international trade and macroeconomics, with a particular focus on trade policy and how firms and economies adjust to global shocks. During my Ph.D., I gained research and policy experience at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), and was affiliated with the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at the London School of Economics. My work combines micro-level data, economic theory, and quantitative methods to study policy-relevant questions in the global economy.

Job Market Paper

Pricing in Levels and Non-Discriminatory Trade Policies

Cost-based trade measures, including carbon border adjustments and countervailing duties, are increasingly used to reshape global trade. Their incidence and efficiency hinge on how exporters translate marginal cost changes into export prices. Using transaction-level data for Chinese exporters and exogenous movements in world input prices, this paper provides new evidence on input cost pass-through to export prices. Pass-through is incomplete and heterogeneous in percentage terms, but linear in levels: a one-dollar increase in marginal cost raises the export price by about 0.4 dollar. Within a destination--product market, lower-priced firms pass through less in percentage terms, as a per-unit price intercept common to all firms in the market implies, and neither size, export intensity nor productivity shifts that relation. Motivated by this evidence, we develop an open economy model with variable markups and constant level pass-through. Firms optimally choose prices that are linear in marginal costs, yielding a tractable link between cost exposure and pricing decisions. The resulting demand system features variable elasticities and endogenous markups while remaining analytically transparent. In this environment, a broad class of non-discriminatory trade policies that shift marginal costs proportionally can reduce misallocation and raise world welfare, provided that level pass-through is common across exporters within a market, the condition the within-market evidence supports and nothing in the data rejects. The framework offers a disciplined way to incorporate empirically relevant currency unit pricing into quantitative trade and policy analysis.

Working Papers

Centorrino, S., Diakantoni, A., Keck, A., Ruta, M., Sztajerowska, M., & Wei, Y. – "Measuring Global Trade Policy Activity" 

Jakubik, A., & Wei, Y. – "U.S. Trade Policy Uncertainty and the Current Account: Unpacking Trade and Financial Channels"