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Antrās Named Professor of Economics
Cambridge, Mass. - April 24, 2008 - Pol Antrās, a leader in the study of the organizational aspects of international trade, globalization and outsourcing, has been appointed professor of economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, effective July 1, 2007.
Antrās, 32, was previously assistant professor of economics at Harvard, where he has been on the faculty since 2003.
"Professor Antrās is widely regarded as a forerunner in the study of international trade, and his work has extended research within the field into new territory," says David Cutler, divisional dean for the social sciences in FAS. "His theoretical analysis of globalization, outsourcing and offshoring has proven to be highly influential and groundbreaking, and also has many uses in applied economics. His continued research of this topic will reinforce his role as a leader in the field."
Antrās studies organizations and trade, and particularly within-firm foreign trade. In his research, he examines property rights, contracts and firms, as well as the reasons that lead some firms to contract with international manufacturing facilities as opposed to owning their facilities that are operated abroad.
Antrās' research shows that when manufacturing work is labor intensive, such as that which is involved with textiles, companies are more likely to contract international factories, as opposed to owning the facility. This is because the incentives of local managers to ensure worker performance are larger if the plant is locally owned. However, if the manufacturing is done largely with machinery, as is the case in capital intensive sectors, the performance of workers is less of a factor and the facility is more likely to be owned directly by the manufacturing company.
His paper "Offshoring in a Knowledge Economy," which was published in the February 2006 edition of Quarterly Journal of Economics, analyzes how the organization of work and pay are affected when teams of employees are created across different countries. In this work, Antrās has shown that wage inequality is often increased in developing countries when jobs are created due to the outsourcing of manufacturing work. Due to the fact that these developing countries may have a limited number of skilled workers, foreign employers are likely to individually select and aggressively bid for the most skilled individuals when jobs are created, creating greater disparity among all workers.
His current work involves issues of financing, globalization and trade integration. Antrās explores the ways the financial system in the United States differs from that of other countries, and how different access to credit shapes trade flows and capital flows across countries.
Antrās received his B.A. in 1998 and M.A. in 1999, both in economics, from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard, Antrās was a visiting assistant professor of economics at MIT.
He is a member of the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society and the Society of Economic Dynamics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of European Economic Association, Revista de Economia Aplicada, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of International Economics, and Investigaciones Economicas.
Antrās is a faculty associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, a research affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London and a research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. From 2007 to 2009 he is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. From 2005 to 2008 he was an Andrew E. Furer Fellow with Department of Economics at Harvard.
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