Overview

Departmental faculty active in international trade and policy include Larry Karp, Brian Wright, and David Roland-Holst. In addition to teaching and advising students and pursuing academic research, members of the faculty have provided counsel on policy issues to international, national, and state agencies.

The ARE Department has expanded its teaching and research in international trade and Ph.D. students can now take trade as their major field. We encourage applications from qualified candidates interested in doctoral study in this field.

The ARE Department is an excellent place to undertake graduate research on economic globalization including:

• trade
• foreign investment
• migration
• international environmental agreements
• intellectual property regimes.

Students can take advantage of the breadth and depth of faculty in ARE and in other Berkeley departments. By drawing on the expertise of ARE's excellent theoretical and empirical trade economists, as well as its applied econometricians, graduate students can produce top quality work on this complex and important topic.

Students interested in the linkages between economic globalization and policy, development, or environmental issues can draw on ARE's expertise in these areas, and may wish to make one of these their minor field. ARE faculty also work on questions related to labor and trade or foreign investment, and bring insights from behavioral economics to bear on questions of international policy. Students interested in this sort of work may wish to take labor or psychology in economics as a minor field through the Economics department.

Perhaps the best measure of the quality of ARE's graduate program is what our students do upon degree completion. Recent graduates have taken jobs at top-notch educational institutions that include Cornell, Columbia, Tufts, the University of Michigan, the London School of Economics, and the University of California. Graduates have also found work in non-government organizations, including the World Bank and Resources for the Future; government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the General Accounting Office, and the Mexican Environmental Ministry; and in private industry.

For more information on our program, please contact Gail Vawter (gvawter@berkeley.edu) at (510) 642-3347. Information on applying to the program is available on the Graduate Division website.

Courses

The first year of the graduate program at ARE is spent studying microeconomic theory, topics in applied economics, and econometrics. An introduction to graduate level trade theory and policy is one of the four topics in applied economics.

In the second year, students interested in international trade take at least two field courses and prepare for the field exam. Students may take a combination of trade field courses from ARE and the Economics Department. Trade courses at Berkeley include:

ECON 281/ARE 239: Seminar in International Trade and Finance
New research from both Berkeley and external faculty and graduating students (1 unit, Fall and Spring)
Profs Gourinchas and Obstfeld.

ECON 280A: International Economics
Theory of international trade including comparative advantage, factor endownments and specialization, factor prices and income distribution, scale economies and product differentiation, economic growth and trade, trade protection and economic welfare.
Prof. Pranab Bardhan

ARE 232: Empirical International Trade and Foreign Investment
This is a graduate course focusing on the empirical aspects of international trade, foreign investment, and the environment. We will focus on a variety of issues that are related to testing various trade models as well as other issues. The topics will include the following:

• testing trade models (HO, Ricardo, Specific Sector)
• the linkages between openness and growth
• trade orientation and firm performance
• the effects of foreign direct investment on developing countries
• labor markets and trade.

We will also address several new topics in international trade that have empirical applications, such as trade models with heterogeneous firms. We will rely primarily on journal articles and working papers, although you should consult Robert Feenstra’s book, Advanced International Trade: Theory and Evidence, which is required.
Prof. Hanemann

Faculty

	Larry Karp Ph.D., University of California, Davis, 1982 Fields: Design of international environmental agreements; international investment agreements; trade liberalization and environment; instrument selection for pollution control; alternative discounting models. Recent Publications
	David Roland-Holst Fields: Development; Energy; Environment and climate change; Trade; Food and Agricultural Policy.
	Brian Wright Ph.D., Harvard University Fields: International intellectual property rights issues and developing countries. Global commodity market behavior and commodity market stabilization.

Economics Department

• Pranab Bardhan
• Barry Eichengreen
• Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas

Haas School of Business

• Richard Lyons
• Maury Obstfeld
• Andrew Rose

Political Science Department

• Vindo Aggarwal

Past Student Placements