Gregory W. Whitten
Contact
Information
Dorothy Y L Wong Building, Room 317
Department of Economics
Lingnan University
8 Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun, New Territories,
Hong Kong SAR
Voice: (852) 2616 7181
Fax: (852) 2891 7940
E-mail: [email protected]
Research
Interests
Currency unions, international trade, exchange rate regimes, macroeconomics, and applied econometrics
Education
University of Pittsburgh
Ph.D., Economics, August 2013
• Dissertation Title: “Essays on currency unions and trade”
• Advisor: Steven Husted
University of Wisconsin-Madison
M.Sc., Economics, December 2005 (PhD track)
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
M.A., Economics, May 2003
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
B.A., Economics, French Literature, International Studies (Summa cum laude), December 2001
Honors and
Awards
Andrew Mellon Pre-doctoral Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 2011-2012
Summer research fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 2009 & 2010
Best ASEC Teaching Assistant, Department of Statistics, University of Pittsburgh, 2010
Arts & Sciences Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 2007-2008
WARF Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004-2005
Rhodes Scholarship State Finalist, 2001
Truman Scholarship Finalist, 2001
Phi Beta Kappa, 2000
Roberta and J. Martin Klotsche Scholarship for International Studies, University of WisconsinMilwaukee, 1999
Outstanding Scholar Award, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee: full tuition for 8 semesters, 19972001
Academic
Experience
University of Pittsburgh
Instructor
January - April, 2013
Taught a stand-alone course to 40 students. Wrote and graded my own assignments and exams
consisting exclusively of short-answer and mini-essay style questions analyzing articles from The
Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Journal of Economic Perspectives,
and Review of International Economics.
• Introduction to International Economics
Graduate Teaching Assistant
Fall 2008 - Spring 2011
Led recitations for 3 graduate and 3 undergraduate classes. Duties included writing assignments and
exams (graduate courses), grading assignments and exams (graduate and undergraduate courses),
and holding regular office hours.
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Graduate Microeconomics 1, (Fall 2008, Fall 2009)
Basic Applied Statistics, (Spring 2009, Spring 2010)
Introductory Microeconomics, (Summer 2010, Fall 2010)
Graduate General Econometrics (Spring 2011)
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Graduate Student Instructor
January 2002 - May,
2003
Taught a stand-alone course of introductory macroeconomics to 40 students, including many nontraditional/returning students for 3 semesters.
• Principles of Macroeconomics
Publications
“Supplemental Education Services Under No Child Left Behind: Who Signs Up, and What Do
They Gain?” (joint with Carolyn Heinrich and Robert Meyer), Educational Evaluation and Policy
Analysis, June 2010
Papers in
preparation
“Would a currency union by any other name be as integrated?”
Conventional wisdom suggests that currency unions engage in substantial intra-union trade. This
paper demonstrates that the extent of intra-union trade varies widely across unions and is little
related to key characteristics of a currency union, such as TFP shocks or inflation. The currency
union effects are positively correlated with tariffs on goods traded within the union. The higher the
tariff, the greater incentive for importers to avoid foreign exchange transaction costs by purchasing
within the union. Consequently, intraunion trade is larger, though the common currency does not
lower trade costs directly. The common currency becomes the means by which importers mitigate
trade costs in the presence of high tariffs.
“Sector-specific gravity, bilateral trade, and currency unions”
Gravity theory and the gravity equation have proven to be useful and successful tools at explaining
and analyzing the determinants of bilateral trade flows. Though successful, gravity has been limited
as it is designed only to describe aggregate trade. This paper uses the sector-specific gravity equation
developed by Anderson and Yotov (2010) to show that control variables commonly used in the
gravity literature tends to have larger effects, relative to distance, for manufacturing trade than for
agricultural trade. Particular manufacturing industries that rely on agriculture inputs (textiles and
food, beverage, and tobacco) share characteristics with both agricultural and manufacturing trade
while machinery and chemicals share characteristics with just manufacturing trade. Following the
spirit of Huchet-Bourdon and Cheptea (2011), this paper compares the effect of a common currency
on trade across different classes of traded goods.
“Price co-movements within currency unions”
This paper analyzes currency union integration by testing whether price levels in member countries
possess a common stochastic trend. The trace statistic test for cointegration proposed by Johansen
(1995) demonstrates the presence of such a trend for most unions. A disaggregated analysis identifies
a common stochastic trend for several though fewer than half of country pairs within a union,
particularly compared to the set of country pairs not in unions. Some unions such as the Eurozone
have small shares of cointegrated country pairs. These results provide an alternative metric to
intra-union trade for gauging the extent of currency union integration.
“Price co-movements within preferential trade agreements (PTAs)”
This paper tests for a common stochastic trend among the price levels of a PTA’s member countries
by testing for cointegration among these price levels. This paper uses the trace statistic test to
examine if a cointegrating vector exists for the price indices of signatories to a PTA. Whereas the
first part of the paper tests directly for cointegration by examining the PTA as a whole (multilateral
analysis), the second part tests for cointegration among all country pairs that comprise the PTA
(bilateral analysis). This conceptualization permits the creation of a control group. If the treatment
group consists of an PTA defined by a series of country pairs where both countries belong to the
PTA, then consider the following to be a control group for any given PTA: the set of all country
pairs where exactly one country belongs to the PTA in question and exactly one country does not
belong to the PTA in question. Call this last set of pairs a “partial” or “pseudo” PTA. Comparing
the share of country pairs exhibiting cointegration in the true PTA with the share of country pairs
exhibiting cointegration in the pseudo PTA provides a control group against which to gauge the
extent of cointegration within the PTA as “high” or not.
“A framework for to correct the firm heterogeneity with panel data: Helpman, Melitz,
and Rubinstein with panel data”
Recent work recognizes the importance of firm-level heterogeneity leading to selection into the export
market and the importance of this heterogeneity in analyzing aggregate trade flows. This paper
adapts Helpman, Melitz, and Rubinstein (2008) to a panel framework and confirms the importance
of firm-level selection and productivity heterogeneity in the time series of export data. The paper
also compares and contrasts the effects on trade of European efforts to stabilize exchange rates prior
to the introduction of the euro with the effects on trade following the introduction of the euro.
Conference
Presentations
National Taiwan University, December 2014
Global Trade Analysis Project, Dakar, June 2014
China Trade Research Group, Chengdu, May 2014
Eurasia and Business Economics Society, Singapore, January 2014
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for Research on International Economics, May 2012
Washington State University Invitational Graduate Student Conference Series, October 2011
University of Pittsburgh College of Arts & Sciences Graduate Exposition, March 2011
Professional
Experience
International Baccalaureate Organisation
Assistant examiner
May 2008 - present
Grade 100+ scripts for the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in Economics
(Paper 3) based on the markscheme published by IB senior examiners.
American Economics Association Publications, Pittsburgh, PA (USA)
Classifier
August 2008 - July 2013
Classified articles in a variety of economic and multidisciplinary journals according to the Journal
of Economic Literature’s Classification Codes (EconLit). Collaborated on annual edits to EconLit,
writing summaries and identifying example articles for new Classification Codes.
Value-Added Research Center (VARC), Wisconsin Center for Education Research
(WCER), University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA)
Assistant Researcher
February 2006 - July 2007
Wrote computer programs for SAS and SPSS to extract student-level data for evaluation projects.
Organized focus groups of parents.
Institute for Survey and Policy Research, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA)
Associate Research Specialist
September 2003 - August 2004
Collaborated on economic impact studies of local construction projects. Used Stata and RIMS
Input-Output multipliers from BEA (US Department of Commerce).
U.S. Consulate General, Osaka, Japan
Administrative Intern
June 2002 - August 2002
U.S. Mission to OECD, Paris, France
Administrative Intern
June 1999 - September 1999
Computer Skills
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Languages
• English: Native Speaker
• French: Certificat supérieur, niveau A, de la langue et de la civilization française de la Sorbonne,
2000, L’Université de Paris-IV (La Sorbonne)
• Japanese: Conversational (5 semesters of coursework)
• Putonghua/Mandarin Chinese: Basic
Stata
Matlab
SAS
Mathematica
LATEX