Import Competition and Earnings Inequality

Wolfgang Keller has recently worked on the role of trade in the polarisation of rich countries' labour markets, showing that in the particular case of Denmark, rising import competition from China accounts for about 16% of Denmark's recent increase in earnings inequality. He will spend part of May 2016 working with co-authors at CESifo on the relationship between innovation and uncertainty as firms prepare to export, as well as on other projects. His research is at the interface of international trade and the economics of technology, and also focuses on issues in growth and long-run development, especially in China. Recent work has also examined Wal-Mart's role in the productivity transformation of Mexico's manufacturing sector, the industry productivity changes resulting from import liberalisation and why the first industrial revolution took place in England and not in China.

Wolfgang Keller is Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, as well as CESifo Research Network Fellow, NBER Research Associate and CEPR Research Fellow. Previously he was on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Texas at Austin as well as visiting professor at Princeton, Stanford and Brown. His honours include years as a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, Peter B. Kenen Fellow at Princeton and Humboldt Research Professor in Munich. Born and raised in Koblenz, Mr Keller received his diploma from Freiburg University in 1990 and his PhD from Yale University in 1995.

Wolfgang Keller's articles are published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Econometrics and other journals. His research on economic growth and innovation has been supported by four grants of the US National Science Foundation, and he frequently serves as ad-hoc referee for national science foundations of Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and other countries. Mr Keller lives in the mountains near Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and frequent co-author, Carol H. Shiue, and their children, Kai (ten) and Mia (five).