This three-hour workshop will feature Professor Yotov – an expert on structural gravity models and economic sanctions – who will present an overview of the gravity model with a focus on applications to economic sanctions.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the gravity equation. Since then, the structural gravity model has become the workhorse model in international trade and has been applied and extended in thousands of papers by trade economists, colleagues from other fields, and policy practitioners. The gravity model provides an intuitive framework for modelling flows between countries, with many applications in trade policy and beyond. It is commonly applied to evaluate the impact of free trade agreements, sanctions, institutional quality etc., while it also has applications beyond international trade, such as modelling migration flows.

Speaker Bio:

Professor Yotov is a Professor of Economics at Drexel University (USA) and a Research Professor at the Centre for International Economics at the IFO Institute (University of Munich, Germany). Professor Yotov’s main research interests are in international trade, and his best-known scholarly contributions are related to modelling and estimation with the gravity model of trade and quantifying the effects of trade and trade policy on various economic outcomes. Since 2017, he developed a research agenda on sanctions. He also has papers on foreign direct investment, growth, and political economy. His work was published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of International Economics (JIE), the Economic Journal, the European Economic Review (EER), and the International Economic Review. He is an Associate Editor at The Review of International Economics and at Economics Letters, and a Guest Editor for a Special Issue (“Gravity at Sixty”) at the EER. He was also a Guest Editor for a Special Issue on “Economics Sanctions” at the EER.

Together with co-authors, Professor Yotov has written the book “An Advanced Guide to Trade Policy Analysis: The Structural Gravity Model” (Co-published by the United Nations and the WTO), and he has developed the International Trade and Production Database (ITPD-E) (published by the U.S. International Trade Commission, USITC), The Global Sanctions DataBase (GSDB), and the Domestic and International Common Language (DICL) database (published by the USITC).

Professor Yotov has taught at Princeton, the University of Munich, the University of Tübingen, and Boston College, and he held visiting positions at many universities around the world. Through various venues, he has taught gravity, trade research, and trade policy analysis to students, researchers, and policy makers from more than 130 countries. He has also completed many consulting, advising, and training projects for international organisations, national governments, think tanks and research institutes.

This event is supported by the 2022 CASS Small Grants Scheme.

For enquiries about this workshop please contact Dr Maria Jahromi at maria.jahromi@anu.edu.au.