Samuel Kortum named the James Burrows Moffatt Professor of Economics

Samuel S. Kortum, newly named as the James Burrows Moffatt Professor of Economics, focuses his research on international economics, industrial organization, and macroeconomics.

A graduate of Wesleyan University, Kortum earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1992. He has held faculty positions at the University of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, and Boston University. He served as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, a national fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge), and a visiting fellow at INSEE-CREST (Paris). He joined the Yale faculty in 2012 as professor of economics.

Kortum has contributed numerous articles and chapters to edited books and journals on the topic of international trade. He has also explored issues such as trade and carbon taxes, the semiconductor industry, patenting and productivity, and innovation more broadly. He served as editor of the Journal of Political Economy and as associate editor of the European Economic Review. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2011.

In 2004, the Yale professor was awarded the Frisch Medal, considered one of the top three prizes in the field of economics. He has received several grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Environmental Protection Agency.