About

Gita Gopinath is the Gregory and Ania Coffey Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on International Finance and Macroeconomics where she is a leading voice on dollar dominance, exchange rates, trade and investment, international financial crises, monetary policy and debt.

Research topics

• Economics
• Monetary economics
• International economics
• Business
• Finance

Selected publications

• Patterns of invoicing currency in global trade in a fragmenting world economy1

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Sovereign vs. corporate debt and default: More similar than you think

  Journal of International Economics · 2025-04-03 · 1 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Sovereign vs. Corporate Debt and Default: More Similar than You Think

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sovereign vs. Corporate Debt and Default: More Similar than You Think

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Oleg Itskhoki: 2022 John Bates Clark Medalist

  The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 2023-02-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The 2022 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Oleg Itskhoki, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles for his path breaking contributions in international economics. This article summarizes Oleg Itskhoki’s work and places it in the context of the broader literature and emphasizes how it has shed new light on a number of long-standing puzzles regarding the behavior of exchange rates and international relative prices more generally and their connection to macroeconomic fluctuations and government’s choices of monetary and fiscal policies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Central Banks as Dollar Lenders of Last Resort: Implications for Regulation and Reserve Holdings

  IMF Working Paper · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access

  This paper explores how non-U.S. central banks behave when firms in their economies engage in currency mismatch, borrowing more heavily in dollars than justified by their operating exposures. We begin by documenting that, in a panel of 53 countries, central bank holdings of dollar reserves are significantly correlated with the dollar-denominated bank borrowing of their non-financial corporate sectors, controlling for a number of known covariates of reserve accumulation. We then build a model in which the central bank can deal with private-sector mismatch, and the associated risk of a domestic financial crisis, in two ways: (i) by imposing ex ante financial regulations such as bank capital requirements; or (ii) by building a stockpile of dollar reserves that allow it to serve as an ex post dollar lender of last resort. The model highlights a novel externality: individual central banks may tend to over-accumulate dollar reserves, relative to what a global planner would choose. This is because individual central banks do not internalize that their hoarding of reserves exacerbates a global scarcity of dollar-denominated safe assets, which lowers dollar interest rates and encourages firms to increase the currency mismatch of their liabilities. Relative to the decentralized outcome, a global planner may prefer stricter financial regulation (e.g., higher bank capital requirements) and reduced holdings of dollar reserves.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• International Prices, Costs and Markup Differences

  2023-09-13 · 8 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  <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

• International Prices, Costs and Markup Differences

  2023-09-13

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  <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

• A Global Strategy to Manage the Long-Term Risks of COVID-19

  IMF Working Paper · 2022-04-01 · 41 citations

  articleOpen access

  The pandemic is not over, and the health and economic losses continue to grow. It is now evident that COVID-19 will be with us for the long term, and there are very different scenarios for how it could evolve, from a mild endemic scenario to a dangerous variant scenario. This realization calls for a new strategy that manages both the uncertainty and the long-term risks of COVID-19. There are four key policy implications of such as strategy. First, we need to achieve equitable access beyond vaccines to encompass a comprehensive toolkit. Second, we must monitor the evolving virus and dynamically upgrade the toolkit. Third, we must transition from the acute response to a sustainable strategy toward COVID-19, balanced and integrated with other health and social priorities. Fourth, we need a unified risk-mitigation approach to future infectious disease threats beyond COVID-19. Infectious diseases with pandemic potential are a threat to global economic and health security. The international community should recognize that its pandemic financing addresses a systemic risk to the global economy, not just the development need of a particular country. Accordingly, it should allocate additional funding to fight pandemics and strengthen health systems both domestically and overseas. This will require about $15 billion in grants this year and $10 billion annually after that.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Preemptive Policies and Risk-Off Shocks in Emerging Markets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Trade Adjustment in Large Crises

  NSF · $400k · 2011–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Pierre‐Olivier Gourinchas

  94 shared

• Camila Casas

  International Monetary Fund

  72 shared

• Emine Boz

  International Monetary Fund

  70 shared

• Federico J. Díez

  University of Edinburgh

  66 shared

• Mikkel Plagborg‐Møller

  Princeton University

  61 shared

• Oleg Itskhoki

  University of California, Los Angeles

  54 shared

• Mark Aguiar

  46 shared

• Brent Neiman

  Center for Economic and Policy Research

  38 shared