Oleg Itskhoki

In a key part of his research, Itskhoki, Elhanan Helpman and Stephen Redding develop a framework wherein more productive firms pay higher wages and exporting increases the wage paid by a firm with a given productivity, resulting in a setting where trade liberalization can either raise or reduce unemployment but always increases wage inequality relative to autarky. Building on this model, Itskhoki, Helpman, Redding and Marc-Andreas Muendler find that firm employment size and trade participation are related to wage dispersion between firms, which drives the component of wage inequality within sectors and occupations, with the resulting distribution of wages and employment in Brazilian linked employer-employee data closely approximated by Helpman, Itskhoki and Redding's 2010 model. Moreover, in earlier work Itskhoki and Helpman have explored how labour market rigidities in a two-country, two-sector model of international trade affects unemployment.

Oleg Itskhoki (born in Moscow on January 7, 1983) is a Russian-American economist specialized on macroeconomics and international economics and (as of 2022) a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He won the John Bates Clark Medal for his "fundamental contributions to both international finance and international trade" in 2022.

Born in Moscow in 1983, Oleg Itskhoki earned his B.A. in economics from the Moscow State University in 2003, followed by a M.A. in economics from the New Economic School in 2004. He then pursued PhD studies in economics at Harvard University, graduating in 2009 with a dissertation on the relationship between international trade and unemployment, inequality and redistribution under the advisorship of Elhanan Helpman, Gita Gopinath, Aleh Tsyvinski and Pol Antras. After his studies, Itskhoki worked as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, including as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2015–2017. In 2019, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was honoured with the Venu and Ana Kotamraju Endowed Chair in Economics in 2020. Additionally, Itskhoki works an associate editor for the American Economic Review, as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and as a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).