Thibault Fally joined the faculty of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in July 2013. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Thibault earned a PhD from the Paris School of Economics in 2009 and taught at the Economics Department at the University of Colorado-Boulder. His research interestsmainly relate to firm decisions and trade, which includes various topics such as supply chains, foreign direct investment, non-homothetic preferences, institutions (financial development in particular), economic geography, income inequalities, industrial organization and firm structure.

His work on financial development (access to finance) investigates whether and how it can foster various outcomes such as entrepreneurship, firm size, firm growth and trade. This includes a first paper (with Philippe Aghion and Stefano Scarpetta) on firm creation and firm growth. A second paperrelated to financial markets (with Juan Carluccio) examines how multinational firms choose their suppliers and mode of organization depending on their access to finance such as local banks.

Another part of his research agenda is to understand how firms interact along supply chains or across different supply chains, and their impact on wages. Recently, Thibault’s work has examined how cross-industry input-output tables can provide useful information on supply chains. In a series of three papers, he has developed a model and various indexes to describe the length and integration of supply chains, and the specialization of countries along those chains.

Finally, a more recent line of his research emphasizes the role of demand in shaping production and trade patterns. In a series of papers with Justin Caron and James Markusen, they show that income effects in consumption can shed light on the missing trade puzzle and low trade volumes between developing and developed countries when income elasticities in consumption are correlated with the skill intensity in production across sectors. Another implication of this correlation is the rising skill premium. In two recent papers with Ben Faber and coauthors, they exploit detailed microdata on household consumption to estimate changes in welfare and price indexes across the income distribution.