James Markusen

James R. Markusen is an American economist, academic, and author. He is Distinguished Professor (emeritus) at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Markusen is known for his works using analytical theory, numerical simulation, and empirical estimation. Among his authored works are publications in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of International Economics, as well as books such as Multinational Firms and the Theory of International Trade.

Markusen is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, and an affiliate at CESifo, Munich. He has served as the co-editor of Journal of International Economics.

Markusen completed his B.A. in Economics in 1970 from Boston College. Later in 1973, he obtained a PHD in Economics under the supervision of James E. Anderson and John G. Riley from the same institution.

Markusen began his academic career in 1972 by joining the University of Western Ontario as a professor of economics and served until 1990. In 1990, he joined the University of Colorado, where he held multiple appointments including serving as a university Distinguished Professor, Stanford Calderwood Professor of Economics from 2000 to 2003 and continues to hold the position of Distinguished Professor emeritus at the same institution. From 2008 to 2010, he served as a professor of economics at University College Dublin. In 2017, he became an Adjunct Professor at Shandong University, a position he held until 2020.

Between 1999 and 2004, he worked as a research associate at the Centre for Economics and Business Research, Copenhagen. Concurrently, he served as an Economic Policy Panelist at the Centre for Economic Policy Research London in 2000 and 2001. Since 1996, he has been a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London, and also held the position of research associate at the Institute for International Integration Studies at Trinity College Dublin since from 2003 to 2004. Additionally, he has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1990.

Markusen's research has focused on analytical theory, empirical estimation, and numerical simulation. He has authored publications spanning the areas of multinationals, international trade, modeling and simulation, and microeconomics including books, book chapters, and articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Markusen's international trade and economics research has contributed to the identification of factors that influence trade patterns. His early research investigated how multinational firms can strategically manage their valuable knowledge capital when expanding abroad, considering options like exporting, licensing, and subsidiary acquisition, while analyzing the factors influencing these choices and their impact on international specialization patterns. Focusing his research efforts on the complex decision-making process of whether and how various issues should be combined in international trade negotiations, he along with Ignatius J. Horstmann proposed a formal framework using a two-issue bargaining model, highlighting the potential benefits and trade-offs of both separate negotiations and linked negotiations. His 2007 synthetic analysis with Anthony J. Venables explored how countries' participation in the global economy, considering factors like trade costs and trade fragmentation, impacts their production specialization, trade volume, and welfare levels, revealing that while fragmentation generally increases trade and welfare, some countries may experience negative effects. In related research, he used gains-from-trade theory to analyze the effects of trade expansion through fragmentation and offshoring of new goods and intermediates and highlighted how changing trade dynamics in fragmented economies can affect the conditions under which countries benefit from liberalization. More recently in 2014, his study proposed an alternative approach to international trade analysis by examining the relationship between the characteristics of goods and services in production and consumer preferences and established a strong correlation between skilled-labor intensity and income elasticity.