Anil Gogebakan
Research Associate Cardiff Business School | Research Partner, Smart Prosperity Institute
Research Associate Cardiff Business School | Research Partner, Smart Prosperity Institute
Welcome! I am a Research Associate at Cardiff Business School & Wales Productivity Forum and a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Calgary (Oral defense scheduled for September 03, 2026), with a research focus on international trade, energy and environmental economics. I also serve as a Research Partner at the Smart Prosperity Institute, where I lead a $30,000 research grant-funded project examining the productivity effects of energy efficiency in Canada. My broader interests include applied econometrics, trade policy, and high-resolution air pollution modeling using InMAP. My work has been published in The World Economy and presented at major international conferences. I am in 2025-2026 Job Market.
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Energy Misallocation and Aggregate Productivity: Evidence from Canada (JMP)
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Slide Deck (PDF)
Abstract: This paper quantifies aggregate productivity losses from energy misallocation. While energy is an essential input, the aggregate productivity effects of its misallocation remain largely unknown. Unlike capital and labor, energy is geographically less mobile, heavily regulated, and highly exposed to global shocks. These characteristics can amplify the productivity costs of energy misallocation. I incorporate energy as a third input by extending the Hsieh–Klenow framework and quantify productivity losses using Canadian provincial input-output data from 2014–2020. I move beyond firm-level analysis in manufacturing to focus on the entire economy at the sector level and incorporate a spatial dimension across regions. I decompose productivity losses into within- and between-sector components and quantify the contribution of each input separately. I find that aggregate productivity could be 5–8% higher when all input misallocation is eliminated. While most losses are driven by interprovincial misallocation, energy accounts for up to one-third of aggregate productivity losses, despite its relatively small input share. Its contribution exceeds labor and is comparable to capital. This highlights energy misallocation as an important and underexplored source of productivity losses.
Revisiting Trade and Income in the New Era of Globalisation: Distance, Big Boats, and Natural Barriers to Trade
The World Economy, Volume 48, Issue 12, Pages 886–921.
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Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between international trade and income, exploiting a dynamic distance measure generated by the growth of container ships and Panama Canal capacity. Employing a version of the gravity model, this paper constructs an instrument for trade that accounts for bilateral trade flow differences driven by the Panama Canal and big ships. I exploit the created instrument, given its purely geography-based nature, to estimate the impact of trade on income between 2002 and 2022. This paper finds a trade elasticity of income at 0.4, indicating that a one-dollar increase in trade translates into a 40-cent higher income on average. Compared to earlier studies, this indicates a more pronounced impact of trade on income in the recent era of globalisation.
Uneven Gains: The Environmental Justice Impact of the RGGI on Air Pollution and Health
(Joint with Sookti Chaudhary and Linh Pham)
Abstract: This paper examines the distributional impacts of carbon cap-and-trade programs, using the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) program in the U.S. northeastern states as a quasi-natural experiment. First, using power-plant level data from 2000 to 2019, we evaluate the indirect effects of the CO2 cap set by the RGGI on local air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and sulphur dioxide (SO2). Our empirical approach employs a difference-in-differences (DiD) strategy with heterogeneous treatment effects to preserve the differential impacts of the program across individual power plants. Next, based on the estimated plant-level pollution reductions from the DiD model, we investigate the differences in emissions across various locations, to identify the environmental justice (EJ) effects of the cap-and-trade program. Specifically, we feed the DiD results into a high-resolution intervention air pollution model (InMAP) to analyze the variations in pollution reduction amounts among different demographic groups across fine-grained areas (1 km x 1 km), aggregated to the census tract level. We find significant variation in how the program affects emissions across power plants, leading to uneven health benefits, with avoided deaths varying by regions.
Here is my Research Statement.
I have extensive teaching experience in both undergraduate and graduate-level economics courses. I have served as a Course Instructor at the University of Calgary and have supported several graduate-level courses as a Teaching Assistant.
Here is my Teaching Statement.
Download a full version of my academic CV below:
Download CV (PDF)Email: anil.gogebakan@ucalgary.ca | GogebakanA@cardiff.ac.uk
Smart Prosperity Instititue (SPI) Profile