About

Ann E. Harrison is a renowned economist and the Gary and Sherron Kalbach Chair in Business Administration at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, where she served as the 15th dean. She is a highly cited scholar specializing in foreign investment, multinational firms, international trade, and global strategy, with a particular focus on emerging markets such as India and China. Harrison has contributed significantly to understanding industrial policy, trade, offshoring, and the impact of globalization on labor and development. Her background includes a PhD in economics from Princeton University and a bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley with a double major in economics and history. Prior to her deanship at Haas, she was the William H. Wurster Professor of Multinational Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and served as the director of development policy at the World Bank. Her leadership at Haas included expanding faculty diversity, increasing fundraising, and launching innovative programs in sustainability, access, and entrepreneurship. Harrison's research and policy work have influenced global economic development, industrial policy, and the role of multinational corporations in emerging markets.

Research topics

• Business
• Economics
• Labour economics
• Monetary economics
• Economic geography
• Macroeconomics
• International economics
• Demographic economics
• Market economy
• Ecology
• Biology

Selected publications

• Can a tiger change its stripes? Reform of Chinese state-owned enterprises in the penumbra of the state

  International Journal of Industrial Organization · 2025-11-29 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Disentangling Various Explanations for the Declining Labor Share: Evidence from Millions of Firm Records

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Transforming Business Education for Sustainability

  California Management Review · 2024-12-20 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In an era of catastrophic climate change, businesses that are sustainable will be more likely to survive and thrive. The same is true of business schools. This article discusses different business school approaches to this transformation, touching on both successes and ongoing challenges. While its focus is on Berkeley Haas, it also draws on a 2022 benchmarking survey of other business schools. Mainstreaming sustainability education into the business school curriculum is not without its challenges, yet considerable progress has been made.

  PublisherDOI

• Disentangling Various Explanations for the Declining Labor Share: Evidence from Millions of Firm Records

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-01-01 · 8 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper uses millions of records from a cross-country and time series database of establishments for France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, and South Korea to disentangle the role of technological change, intangible assets, market power, and globalization in driving changes in the labor share. This is the first paper using global micro data to embed all 4 drivers of labor share changes in the same framework. As is standard, labor shares are measured as the share of total remuneration to workers in value-added. Technological change is captured using research and development expenditures. Market power is measured using four firm and twenty firm concentration ratios and globalization is measured as export shares in total revenues. The evidence suggests that between 1995 and 2019 important drivers of falling labor shares were globalization and technological change. The impact of market power as measured by four firm concentration ratios is mixed and depends on the country institutional context. We also disentangle the drivers of labor share changes by exploring the determinants of labor demand and wages. Labor demand is significantly and negatively associated with market concentration and technological change, but positively associated with globalization. In contrast, wages are negatively associated with globalization.

  PublisherDOI

• Escaping import competition in China

  Journal of International Economics · 2023-10-31

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Leveraging International Mechanisms for Human Rights Impact at the National Level

  2023-09-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Does direct foreign investment affect domestic credit constraints?

  World Scientific Studies in International Economics · 2022-07-01 · 13 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Firms in developing countries cite credit constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Direct foreign investment may ease credit constraints by bringing in scarce capital. Alternatively, if foreign firms borrow heavily from domestic banks, they may crowd local firms out of domestic capital markets. Using firm data from the Ivory Coast, we test whether: (1) domestic firms are more credit constrained than foreign firms, and (2) whether borrowing by foreign firms exacerbates domestic firm credit constraints. Results provide support for both hypotheses. We also find that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are less financially constrained than other domestic enterprises.

  PublisherDOI

• Learning versus Stealing: How Important Are Market-Share Reallocations to India’s Productivity Growth?

  World Scientific Studies in International Economics · 2022-07-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Recent trade theory emphasizes the role of marker-share reallocations across firms (“stealing”) in driving productivity growth, whereas previous literature focused on average productivity improvements (“learning”). We use comprehensive, firm-level data from India’s organized manufacturing sector to show that market-share reallocations were briefly relevant to explain aggregate productivity gains following the beginning of India’s trade reforms in 1991. However, aggregate productivity gains during the period from 1985 to 2004 were largely driven by improvements in average productivity. We show that India’s trade, FDI, and licensing reforms are not associated with productivity gains stemming from market share reallocations. Instead, we find that most of the productivity improvements in Indian manufacturing occurred through “learning” and that this learning was linked to the reforms. In the Indian case, the evidence rejects the notion that market share reallocations are the mechanism through which trade reform increases aggregate productivity. Although a plausible response would be that India’s labor laws do not easily permit market share reallocations, we show chat restrictions on labor mobility cannot explain our results.

  PublisherDOI

• Has Globalization Eroded Labor’s Share? Some Cross-Country Evidence

  World Scientific Studies in International Economics · 2022 · 168 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Labour economics
  • Economics
  • Business

  In recent years, economists and other social scientists have devoted extensive research efforts to understanding the widening wage gap between high-skill and low-skill workers. This paper focuses on a slightly different question: how has globalization affected the relative share of income going to capital and labor? Using a panel of over one hundred countries, this paper analyses trends in labor shares and examines the relationship between shares and measures of globalization. Contrary to recent literature, the evidence suggests that labor shares are not constant over time. Over the 1960 to 2000 period, labor shares in poor countries fell, while shares in rich countries rose. These changes in labor shares are driven by changes in factor endowments and government spending, as well as by traditional measures of globalization, such as trade shares, exchange rate crises, movements in foreign investment, and capital controls. In particular, the results suggest that rising trade shares and exchange rate crises reduce labor’s share, while increasing capital intensity, capital controls and government spending increase labor’s share.

  PublisherDOI

• TRADE LIBERALIZATION AND WAGE INEQUALITY IN MEXICO

  World Scientific Studies in International Economics · 2022-07-01 · 39 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  During the 1980s in Mexico the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers widened. The authors assess the extent to which this increased wage inequality was associated with Mexico’s sweeping trade reform in 1985. Examining data on 2, 354 Mexican manufacturing plants for 1984-90 and Mexican Industrial Census data for 1965-88, they find that the reduction in tariff protection in 1985 disproportionately affected low-skilled industries. Goods from that sector, the authors suggest, may have fallen in price because of increased competition from economies with reserves of cheap unskilled labor larger than Mexico’s. The consequent increase in the relative price of skill-intensive goods could explain the increase in wage inequality.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Causes and Consequences of the "Missing Middle": Informality, Productivity, and the Size Distribution of Manufacturing Firms in India

  NSF · $291k · 2009–2014

• Overseas Investment and Labor Market Outcomes Using BEA Micro Data

  NSF · $153k · 2004–2008

Frequent coauthors

• Margaret McMillan

  Tufts University

  58 shared

• Avraham Ebenstein

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  56 shared

• Shannon Phillips

  Medical University of South Carolina

  52 shared

• Margaret McMillan

  University of Essex

  39 shared

• Lionel Fontagné

  35 shared

• Shanthi Nataraj

  30 shared

• Leslie Martin

  27 shared

• Justin Yifu Lin

  National Development and Reform Commission

  26 shared