Dynamic Gains from Trade Agreements with Intellectual Property Provisions

The Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs’ Trade Development and Political Economy series presents Ana Maria Santacreu.

Santacreu develops a quantitative multi-country trade model of innovation and technology licensing to study short- and long-term effects of trade agreements with intellectual property (IP) provisions. A trade agreement involves determining the level of tariffs and IP protection as Nash bargaining between a developed and a developing country. The agreement increases welfare, innovation, and growth in the long run. However, gains accrue differently across countries along the transition. Developing countries experience short-run losses, as they now pay higher licensing prices. An agreement designed by a politically-motivated government could mitigate these losses, but at the expense of lower growth and welfare.

Ana Maria Santacreu is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, where she joined the Research Division in September 2013. Prior to that she was an assistant professor in the Economics Department at INSEAD Business School in France and Singapore.

Santacreu’s main areas of research are in international trade, macroeconomics and international finance.  Her work has been published in several economic journals, including the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Journal of Monetary Economics and the Journal of Financial Economics. She is also an Associate editor of the European Economic Review and the Canadian Journal of Economics.  Santacreu holds a doctorate in economics from New York University, a Master of Science in economics from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Universidad de Valencia.