Sebastian Sotelo is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from  the University of Chicago in 2014. Before that, he received a M.S. degree from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain) and a B.A from Universidad del Pacifico (Peru). His research relates mainly to international trade and the evolution of labor demand in the United States.

Part of his work on international trade focuses on agriculture. He has studied how domestic trade barriers reduce the productivity and welfare of farmers in Peru. In joint work with Heitor Pellegrina, he studies how internal migration shapes aggregate comparative advantage in Brazil. He has also worked on international trade more broadly. In joint work with Jonathan Eaton and Samuel Kortum, he has studied the implications of introducing large firms into standard trade models, showing how they affect aggregate volatility and how they account for the lack of trade between some countries. With Javier Cravino, he has studied how international trade reallocates resources away from manufacturing and into services, and how this reallocation increases the skill premium across the world.

His research also studies the evolution of task contents within occupations in the United States. In joint work with Enghin Atalay, Phai Phongthiengtham, and Daniel Tannenbaum he introduces a new data set measuring the evolution of work in the US, which documents large within-occupation changes away from routine and into nonroutine tasks. Subsequent work with this team examines how information and communication technologies triggered this within-occupation evolution and led to increases in inequality. His current work in this area studies the geography of tasks and specialization.