About

Chang-Tai Hsieh is the Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He conducts research on growth and development, with a focus on understanding the factors that influence economic progress. Hsieh has published several papers in top economic journals, including Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy, among others. His work explores topics such as innovation, talent allocation, industrial organization, and the impact of market structures on productivity and growth. Hsieh is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and Academia Sinica. He has received notable awards including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and the Sun Ye-Fang award from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Research topics

• Economics
• Political Science
• Business
• Labour economics
• Market economy
• Law
• Economic system
• Political economy
• Public economics

Selected publications

• Inferring Prices from Quantities

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Replication files for "Contract Labor and Firm Growth in India"

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-03-15

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This v2 of the replication package ensures that no data files are corrupted during ZIP compression.

  PublisherDOI

• Contract Labor and Establishment Growth in India

  Econometrica · 2025-01-01 · 8 citations

  article

  India's Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) requires large manufacturing plants to pay substantial costs if they wish to shrink their workforce. Since the early 2000s, these large plants have dramatically increased their use of contract workers who are not subject to these regulatory constraints. Between 2000 and 2015, the contract labor share in non‐managerial employment nearly doubled at establishments with more than 100 workers (from 21 to 40 percentage points), while it only increased from 14 to 17 percentage points at establishments with less than 50 workers. Over the same period, the thickness of the right tail of the establishment size distribution in formal Indian manufacturing plants increased, the average product of labor at large plants declined, the job creation rate for large plants increased, and the probability that large plants introduced new products rose. We argue that these changes were caused by the increased adoption of contract labor. In a model of establishment growth subject to firing costs, we show that easing access to contract labor increased TFP in Indian manufacturing by 7.3% since the early 2000s, occurring all through a one‐time reduction in misallocation between large and small plants with negligible change in the long‐run growth rate.

  PublisherDOI

• “SPECIAL DEALS”: THE INFORMAL INSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATION OF CHINA’S ECONOMIC GROWTH

  WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2025-06-09

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Non-Tariff Trade Barriers in the U.S.-China Trade War

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: "A Global View of Creative Destruction"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-02-17

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This is the replication package for "A Global View of Creative Destruction," accepted in 2022 by the <i>Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics</i>.

  PublisherDOI

• International Prices, Costs and Markup Differences

  2023-09-13

  preprintOpen access

  <p> Relative cross-border retail prices, in a common currency, comove closely with the nominal exchange rate. Using product-level prices and wholesale costs from a grocery chain operating in the United States and Canada, we decompose this variation into relative costs and markup components. The high correlation of nominal and real exchange rates is driven mainly by changes in relative costs. National borders segment markets. Retail prices respond to changes in costs in neighboring stores within the same country but not across the border. Prices have a median discontinuous change of 24 percent at the border and 0 percent at state boundaries. </p>

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gains from Trade Liberalization with Flexible Extensive Margin Adjustment

  2023-09-13

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  <p>We propose a sufficient statistic to measure the ex-post welfare gains from trade in CES models featuring any productivity distribution and any pattern of selection into production and exporting. This statistic is based on a single data moment, the change in the market share of continuing domestic producers, and a single structural parameter, the elasticity of substitution between products. We apply our statistic to measure Canada's gains from the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement using data on observed firm selection. We find that welfare gains can substantially deviate from welfare estimates implied by formulas that assume a constant extensive margin trade elasticity.</p>

  PublisherDOI

• A Global View of Creative Destruction

  Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics · 2023-03-02 · 13 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We formulate a two-country model of trade and creative destruction by domestic and foreign firms. In the model, trade liberalization quickens the pace of creative destruction and the flow of technology across countries. International idea flows are essential for understanding why country technologies do not drift apart and for matching two empirical facts. First, contracting firms are more likely to lose exports than domestic sales, whereas the opposite is true for expanding firms. Second, the product composition of a country’s exports exhibits ample turnover. In our model, a country’s comparative advantage is constantly shifting due to global creative destruction.

  PublisherDOI

• Measuring the Cost of Living in Mexico and the United States

  American Economic Journal Macroeconomics · 2023-06-30 · 7 citations

  article

  We use a dataset with prices and spending on consumer packaged goods matched at the bar code level across the United States and Mexico to measure the price index in Mexico relative to the United States. Mexican prices relative to the United States are 23 percent lower compared to the International Comparisons Project’s (ICP) price index. We decompose the 23 percent gap into the biases from imputation, sampling, quality, and variety. Quality bias increases Mexican prices by 48 percent. Imputation, sampling, and variety bias lowers Mexican prices by 11 percent, 13 percent, and 33 percent, respectively. (JEL C43, E31, I31, O11, O12)

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Zheng Song

  56 shared

• Peter J. Klenow

  47 shared

• Nicholas Li

  University of Arizona

  41 shared

• Chong‐En Bai

  Tsinghua University

  36 shared

• Pierre‐Olivier Gourinchas

  35 shared

• Ralph Ossa

  University of Zurich

  30 shared

• Gita Gopinath

  30 shared

• Enrico Moretti

  University of California, Berkeley

  29 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1998

• B.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  1993

Awards & honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship
• Elected Member of Academia Sinica
• Sun Ye-Fang Prize (two-time recipient)
• Distinguished Alumni Award