About

Samuel Kortum is the James Burrows Moffatt Professor of Economics at Yale University. He serves as the Chair of the Department of Economics and is involved in research, lectures, and teaching within the department. His contact information includes an office at 87 Trumbull Ave., Room B422, Yale University, New Haven, CT, with a telephone number of 203-432-6217 and an email address at samuel.kortum@yale.edu. The webpage indicates his professional role and affiliation but does not provide additional details about his research focus, background, or key contributions.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Physics
• Economic geography
• Medicine
• Thermodynamics

Selected publications

• Replication Package for: "Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market"

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-03-17

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  "Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market" by Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, and Francis Kramarz, conditionally accepted at Econometrica. This repository contains the replication package for "Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market" by Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, and Francis Kramarz. Jingze Dong, Adaolisa Ezekobe, Etienne Guigue, Lorenzo Kaaks, Tanay Kondiparthy, Titouan Le Calvé, Gautier Lenfant, Lixing Liang, Jonathan Libgober, Alexis Maitre, Berengere Patault, Max Perez Leon, and Laurence Wicht provided excellent research assistance at different stages that allowed this package to be created. The code in this replication package constructs the analysis files from confidential firm-level data matched to individual customers in each country of the European Union (EU). The package includes all non-confidential data used in the analysis including non-confidential moments generated from the confidential CASD (Centre d’Accès Sécurisé aux Données) data.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Package for: "Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market"

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-03-17

  otherOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  "Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market" by Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, and Francis Kramarz, conditionally accepted at Econometrica. This repository contains the replication package for "Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market" by Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, and Francis Kramarz. Jingze Dong, Adaolisa Ezekobe, Etienne Guigue, Lorenzo Kaaks, Tanay Kondiparthy, Titouan Le Calvé, Gautier Lenfant, Lixing Liang, Jonathan Libgober, Alexis Maitre, Berengere Patault, Max Perez Leon, and Laurence Wicht provided excellent research assistance at different stages that allowed this package to be created. The code in this replication package constructs the analysis files from confidential firm-level data matched to individual customers in each country of the European Union (EU). The package includes all non-confidential data used in the analysis including non-confidential moments generated from the confidential CASD (Centre d’Accès Sécurisé aux Données) data.

  PublisherDOI

• Tariffs and Trade Deficits

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-07-01 · 7 citations

  reportOpen access

  We develop a dynamic multi-country Ricardian trade model with aggregate uncertainty, where countries trade goods and assets, leading to trade imbalances.We introduce a method for computing counterfactuals in this setting without specifying the stochastic process of shocks or solving for asset prices.Applying the model to tariff shocks, we quantify their effects on prices, income, expenditure, and trade imbalances.We find that higher U.S. tariffs reduce the U.S. trade deficit through general equilibrium adjustments, but raise domestic prices and lower real consumption.Our findings highlight that movements in trade imbalances are shaped by the structure of global trade and finance, and that attempts to influence external balances through changes in trade barriers carry significant implications for real economic outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Tariffs and Trade Deficits

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Technology and the Global Economy

  Annual Review of Economics · 2024-08-22 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Interpreting individual heterogeneity in terms of probability theory has proved powerful in connecting behavior at the individual and aggregate levels. Returning to Ricardo's focus on comparative efficiency as a basis for international trade, much recent quantitative equilibrium modeling of the global economy builds on particular probabilistic assumptions about technology. We review these assumptions and discuss how they deliver a unified framework underlying a wide range of static and dynamic equilibrium models.

  PublisherDOI

• Technology and the Global Economy

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Interpreting individual heterogeneity in terms of probability theory has proved powerful in connecting behaviour at the individual and aggregate levels.Returning to Ricardo's focus on comparative efficiency as a basis for international trade, much recent quantitative equilibrium modeling of the global economy builds on particular probabilistic assumptions about technology.We review these assumptions and how they deliver a unified framework underlying a wide range of static and dynamic equilibrium models.

  PublisherDOI

• Technology and the Global Economy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Climate Change Policy in the International Context: Solving the Carbon Leakage Problem

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Trade, Leakage, and the Design of a Carbon Tax

  Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy · 2023-01-01 · 19 citations

  article

  Climate policies vary widely across countries, with some countries imposing stringent emissions policies and others doing very little. When climate policies vary across countries, energy-intensive industries have an incentive to relocate to places with few or no emissions restrictions, an effect known as leakage. Relocated industries would continue to pollute but would be operating in a less desirable location. We consider solutions to the leakage problem in a simple setting where one region of the world imposes a climate policy and the rest of the world is passive. We solve the model analytically and also calibrate and simulate the model. Our model and analysis imply: (1) optimal climate policies tax both the supply of fossil fuels and the demand for fossil fuels; (2) on the demand side, absent administrative costs, optimal policies would tax both the use of fossil fuels in domestic production and the domestic consumption of goods created with fossil fuels, but with the tax rate on production lower due to leakage; (3) taxing only production (on the demand side), however, would be substantially simpler and almost as effective as taxing both production and consumption, because it would avoid the need for border adjustments on imports of goods; and (4) the effectiveness of the latter strategy depends on a low foreign elasticity of energy supply, which means that forming a taxing coalition to ensure a low foreign elasticity of energy supply can act as a substitute for border adjustments on goods.

  PublisherDOI

• “Fencing off silicon valley: Cross-border venture capital and technology spillovers”

  Journal of Monetary Economics · 2023-11-04 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research- Penetrating Foreign Markets: A Firm and Product-Level Investigation

  NSF · $139k · 2004–2011

• Collaborative Research: Intertemporal Trade

  NSF · $190k · 2008–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Jonathan Eaton

  292 shared

• Françis Kramarz

  129 shared

• Andrew B. Bernard

  45 shared

• Brent Neiman

  Center for Economic and Policy Research

  36 shared

• J. Jenson

  United States Census Bureau

  36 shared

• Josh Lerner

  Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

  34 shared

• David A. Weisbach

  28 shared

• Ariel Pakes

  18 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow of the Econometric Society
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Frisch Medal (2004)
• Onassis Prize in International Trade (2018)