Robert Christopher Feenstra (born 1956) is an American economist, academic and author. He is the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Chair in International Economics at University of California, Davis. He served as the director of the International Trade and Investment Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1992 to 2016. He also served as Associate Dean in the Social Sciences at the University of California, Davis from 2014 to 2019.
Feenstra's research is focused on the theory and estimation of international trade models, including the measurement issues that arise in these topics. He is most known for his research on: measuring the gains from product variety; assessing the impact of offshoring; and the Penn World Table, a project jointly with the University of Groningen on measuring real GDP across different countries in dollar values. He has written over 100 published articles and six books.
Feenstra was awarded the Bernhard Harms Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy at the University of Kiel in Germany in 2006. He has presented numerous invited lectures at universities around the world. In 2017, he was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society.
Early life and education
Born in Vancouver, Canada, Feenstra was an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, where he completed his B.A. Honors in Economics and was awarded the University Medal in Arts and Sciences in 1977. He then started graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he completed his Ph.D. in 1981. That year, he did a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago.
Career
After completing his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Feenstra taught for five years at the Columbia University. In 1986, he joined the University of California, Davis as an associate professor, becoming a professor in 1990 and a distinguished professor in 2007. In 2006, he was endowed the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Chair in International Economics.
Feenstra was the chair of Department of Economics at UC Davis from 1990 to 1995. From 2014 to 2017, he was appointed as the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Division of Social Sciences, and subsequently from 2017 to 2019 as the Associate Dean of the Faculty in the Social Sciences, College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Davis.
In 1992, Feenstra was appointed as the director of the International Trade and Investment program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He headed the program until 2016. He remains a faculty research fellow at the NBER.
Feenstra has been an international research fellow and then associate of the Kiel Institute for World Economy since 2006. He was the co-editor of the Journal of International Economics from 1987 to 1990. He then served as the editor of the journal from 1995 to 2001. He has been the associate editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Review and American Economic Journal – Economic Policy.
Research
Feenstra's research is focused on the theory and estimation of international trade models, including assessing the impact of trade policies and measurement issues that arise in these topics.
Variety gains from trade
Feenstra wrote the article "New Product Varieties and the Measurement of International Prices," published in the American Economic Review in 1994, which is one of his most widely cited articles. In the article, he discussed how the gains from product variety that arise in models of international trade with monopolistic competition can be measured. The research output is summarized in the book Product Variety and the Gains from International Trade, which was initially presented as the Zeuthen Lectures, University of Copenhagen, 2007;
Offshoring and wage inequality
Feenstra also wrote the article "Integration of Trade and Disintegration of Production in the Global Economy" published in 1998. In the article, he discussed different adaptions of offshoring as well as its global growth from the 1970’s. In joint work with Gordon Hanson, they have discussed the employment and wage effects of offshoring, especially on workers with low skills. The research output is summarized in the book Offshoring in the Global Economy: Theory and Evidence, which was initially presented as the Ohlin Lectures, Stockholm School of Economics, 2008.