Craig A. Chikis
I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Chicago and am on the 2026–27 academic job market.
My research lies at the intersection of macroeconomics, economic growth, and international trade. I study how firms, innovation, and the movement of people and ideas shape trade patterns, reallocation, and aggregate growth.
Download CV · cachikis@uchicago.edu
Fields: Macroeconomics, International Trade, Growth, Productivity, and Entrepreneurship
Research
Job Market Paper
Old Roots, New Routes: The Trade Patterns of Immigrant-Founded Firms
With Berkay Saygin
Abstract
We study how immigrant founders shape U.S. international trade by linking administrative records on firms’ customs transactions and their founders’ countries of birth. We show that immigrant-founded firms are 1.2 percentage points more likely to import, devote 20 percentage points more of their imports to their founders’ birth countries, and pay 16% lower prices for the same products there. These price gaps shrink sharply among firms buying from the same supplier, suggesting that founders’ knowledge helps them find cheaper suppliers. We build a model of migration, occupational choice, and sequential supplier search in which entrepreneurs differ in talent and search costs vary by founder origin and supplier country. Using differences across founder origins in sourcing, import prices, entrepreneurship rates, and firm scale, we estimate that immigrant founders’ search-cost advantages are worth roughly one-tenth of U.S. gains from trade, holding productivity and other incentives for entrepreneurship fixed. Trade liberalization makes these sourcing advantages more valuable, intensifying competition for native entrepreneurs and limiting natives’ welfare gains. Tariffs erode these advantages, easing competition and cushioning natives’ welfare losses.
Publications
A Comment on: “Low Interest Rates, Market Power, and Productivity Growth”
With Jonathan Goldberg and David López-Salido
Published in Econometrica (2023).
Publication
Abstract
Using an endogenous growth model, Liu, Mian, and Sufi (2022) (LMS) show that a decline in the interest rate can lead to a fall in productivity growth and a rise in leader-laggard productivity gaps and firm profits. We identify two issues in their quantitative analysis of transition dynamics: a time-scale error and the omission of composition terms in calculating productivity growth along the transition to a new balanced growth path.
Correcting the time-scale error and including the composition terms, the decline in the interest rate that LMS study leads to a large and protracted productivity boom lasting about 20 years. In addition, the average leader-laggard gap grows much more slowly than reported in their paper. We also point out an issue in their quantitative analysis of steady-state profit shares. These issues are related to the quantitative exercises, and do not affect the key theoretical contributions of LMS.
Working Papers
The Geography of Innovative Firms
With Benny Kleinman and Marta Prato
Abstract
Firms conducting R&D across multiple local markets account for most U.S. innovation. We study how their geographic scope affects growth and whether it is socially optimal. We develop a spatial growth model with multi-market firms that generate local knowledge spillovers. In equilibrium, firms may expand into too few or too many markets, depending on the sensitivity of spillovers to their local footprint. We estimate the model using data on R&D locations, patents, and citations, and find that firms under-invest in geographic expansion. Through model counterfactuals, we show that welfare gains from policies promoting broader geographic expansion are higher than traditional R&D subsidies.
Attention (and Money) Is All You Need: Why Universities Are Struggling to Keep AI Talent
With Ufuk Akcigit, Emin Dinlersoz, and Nathan Goldschlag
Abstract
We construct a novel dataset linking academic publication records to U.S. Census employer–employee data to track 42,000 AI researchers over two decades. We document systematic changes in the allocation of AI talent. Industry increasingly attracts younger and foreign-born researchers, while gender representation improves more in academia. The top 1% of publishing industry scientists now earn $1.5 million more annually than comparable academics, a fivefold increase since 2001. Rising wage premia coincide with greater sorting into large incumbent firms. Researchers who move to industry publish less but patent more, consistent with a shift from open science toward proprietary innovation.
Trade and Decelerating Reallocation
Third-year paper, awarded the 2024 George S. Tolley Prize.
Paper
Abstract
A well-documented observation in the trade literature is that trade shocks often result in a protracted reallocation of productive factors. This paper investigates whether the shock itself, through the strategic responses it elicits from firms, actively contributes to this delay. Empirically, I show that the China trade shock is negatively associated with various measures of business dynamism. Theoretically, I propose a dynamic, two-country model of oligopolistic competition with trade and home-country firm dynamics to explain these facts. In my preferred industry-level instrumental-variables specification, increased import exposure accounts for roughly one-half of the recent decline in U.S. gross job reallocation.
Work in Progress
Creative Destruction When Ideas Are Harder to Find
With Jonathan Goldberg and David López-Salido
Risk Premia and Fed Purchases in the Corporate Bond Market
With Jonathan Goldberg
Technical Publications
Dealer Inventory Constraints in the Corporate Bond Market during the COVID Crisis
With Jonathan Goldberg. Federal Reserve Board FEDS Note (2021).
FEDS Note
Trends in U.S. Business Dynamism and the Innovation Landscape
With Ufuk Akcigit and Sina Ates. Economic Innovation Group report (2023).
Report
Contact
Email: cachikis@uchicago.edu
Personal email: craig.a.chikis@gmail.com