Mateo Hoyos

"Tariffs and Growth: Heterogeneous Effects by Economic Structure". We revisit the relationship between tariffs and GDP per capita, showing that it is mediated by the economic structure. We study the impact on GDP per capita of changes in average tariff rates, making use of country– year observations from 1960 to 2019. Our LP-DiD approach allows us to control for pretrends that might bias the estimates and to estimate medium-term, dynamic effects, in contrast to most literature, which focuses on instantaneous effects or inferences based on 5- or 10-year averages of small samples. Our results, consistent with a specific strand of the trade theory literature, show that the tariffs–growth nexus is contingent on the economic structure: tariff decreases have led to lower economic growth for nonmanufacturer countries but to higher growth for manufacturer countries. Our baseline results are confirmed by several robustness checks, especially the control for relevant confounders in the tariffs–growth nexus and a clean controls analysis aimed to address biases from heterogeneous effects as highlighted by recent difference-in-differences literature. The mechanisms through which these heterogeneous effects seem to work are changes in productivity and capital accumulation, in turn related to changes in the manufacturing share of GDP.

Teaching

Stata Teaching Assistant

• Department of Economics, Amherst College, Fall 2022 – Current

Lecturer

• Intermediate Macroeconomics Department of Economics, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Spring 2022

Teaching Assistant (Summer 2022, Fall 2020, Summer 2020)

• Intermediate Macroeconomics, Introductory Macroeconomics, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Spring 2019;
• Introductory Microeconomics, Department of Economics, UMass Amherst, Spring 2020, Fall 2018

Research

Research Assistant (Spring 2022 and Summer 2021)

• Profs. Jayati Ghosh, Isabella Weber, and Mwangi wa G˜ıth˜ınji, Department of Economics, UMass Amherst, Spring 2020 and Fall 2019