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Gita Gopinath Named Professor of Economics at Harvard
Cambridge, Mass. - July 12, 2010 - Gita Gopinath, an authority on business cycles in emerging markets and on price fluctuations across international borders, has been named professor of economics at Harvard University.
Gopinath was previously associate professor of economics at Harvard, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2005.
"Professor Gopinath's research on emerging markets has proven extremely important to our understanding of their business cycles, and her studies of price stickiness have been highly influential among macroeconomists," says Stephen Kosslyn, dean of social science in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Here on campus, she has played a central role in the vitality of our program in international economics, and especially in teaching and advising students in this field. Her success placing graduate students in top-tier institutions testifies both to her skill as a mentor and to her colleagues' broad interest in her research agenda."
Gopinath's research has examined price stickiness at the U.S. border, addressing questions on whether prices are set in the producer's or the consumer's currency and how this transnational pricing responds to exchange rate shocks. In a study of U.S. import and export prices from 1994 to 2005, she found that 90 percent of imports and 97 percent of exports were priced in dollars. Additionally, she found that only 22 percent of exchange rate fluctuations were passed on to American consumers in the form of higher prices on imported goods, suggesting that these fluctuations produce only small short- and medium-term changes in the price of goods imported into the U.S.
In recent work, Gopinath and her colleagues have shown that this pricing pass-through is much lower when goods are priced in dollars than in other currencies, where fully 95 percent of fluctuations are borne by consumers. She has also used price data from a chain store to show that observed price differences in the U.S. and in Canada are as large as if the two markets were entirely separated rather than substantially conjoined.
Gopinath's research on emerging markets has addressed income fluctuations in these economies. Together with Mark Aguiar of the University of Rochester, Gopinath has developed a model which has ultimately shown that stochastic elements of productivity are much larger in emerging markets than in developed markets. She has also examined whether government actions might shock productivity growth in emerging markets, showing that a combination of limited commitment and impatience on the part of governments can create perpetual cycles of sovereign debt and foreign direct investment.
Gopinath received a B.A. in economics from the University of Delhi in 1992; master's degrees in economics from the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Washington in 1994 and 1996, respectively; and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2001. She was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business from 2001 to 2005, when she joined Harvard as an assistant professor of economics. She was named associate professor at Harvard in 2009.
Gopinath is an associate of the National Bureau for Economic Research, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the International Growth Center at the London School of Economics and Oxford University, and Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She serves at present on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, I.M.F. Economic Review, and Macroeconomics and Finance in Emerging Market Economies.
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