Shraddha Mandi
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Boston University and will be on
the 2026–27 job market.
My research examines how firm organization and the location of
production shape trade policy, productivity, and labor-market outcomes.
I combine quantitative general-equilibrium models with empirical
analysis of cross-country census, firm, household, and geospatial data.
Fields
Macroeconomics, Trade, and Development
Committee
David Lagakos, Natalia Ramondo, and Masao Fukui
Job Market Paper
Multinational Production and Optimal Trade Policy: A Quantitative Approach
This paper studies how multinational production reshapes optimal
unilateral trade policy in a general-equilibrium quantitative trade
model with many countries, sectors, and input-output linkages. I
compare economies with and without multinational production calibrated
to match the same input-output trade data. Accounting for
multinational production lowers effective foreign export-supply
elasticities, raising the optimal U.S. uniform tariff, while largely
preserving the relative exporter-sector tariff schedule. Thus, richer
production choices need not imply more elastic trade: when disciplined
by the same aggregate data, they reveal stronger underlying differences
in production-location fundamentals.
Paper
Coming soon
Slides
Coming soon
Online Appendix
Coming soon
Research
Working Papers
The Dynamics of Agricultural Productivity Gaps
With Douglas Gollin, David Lagakos, and Xiao Ma. June 2026.
Conditionally Accepted at American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
This paper draws on cross-country census data to study how
agricultural productivity gaps have evolved over the last four decades.
We find little tendency for gaps to decline on average despite global
decreases in agricultural employment shares. We analyze the dynamics
of agricultural productivity gaps through the lens of an open-economy
model of structural change. We calibrate the model using international
trade data, which are measured independently from sectoral value added
and employment data. Quantitatively, the model predicts that
relatively faster physical productivity growth in the non-agricultural
sector has, in many countries, offset the movement of labor out of
agriculture, leading to persistently lower value added per worker in
agriculture.
Work in Progress
Misclassification of Locations and the Measurement of Urban-Rural Gaps
With Douglas Gollin, Martina Kirchberger, and David Lagakos.
Most micro surveys in developing countries categorize households and
firms as either urban or rural. These surveys allow researchers to
study spatial variation in outcomes across the urban-rural boundary.
In this paper, we document, for a set of low-income countries,
striking inconsistencies in urban-rural classifications. We show that there is
substantial and non-random misclassification, relative to a widely
used objective measure of urbanization. The resulting biases
potentially affect both cross-section and panel analyses. To
illustrate this point, we show that misclassification leads to
substantial attenuation bias in a standard approach to measuring the
observational returns to migration.
The Impact of Trade Liberalisation on Son Preference: Evidence from India
This paper studies how India's 1991 trade liberalisation affected son
preference. I construct a revealed-preference measure from fertility
histories in the 2002 District Level Household Survey, allowing me to
construct repeated pre- and post-liberalisation cross-sections. I
combine this with district-level variation in exposure to trade
liberalisation and an instrumental-variable strategy addressing
differential trends associated with non-traded employment from
Topalova (2010). I find little average effect on son preference, but a
decline among lower-caste women, highlighting substantial
heterogeneity in responses to trade shocks.