Vanessa Alviarez

Vanessa Alviarez is a Lead Economist in the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Before joining the IDB, she was an Assistant Professor at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2014. Dr. Alviarez’s research examines how the location and sourcing decisions of multinational corporations shape employment, trade patterns, and firm performance. She also studies how firms’ international buyer–supplier networks influence markups and prices in global value chains. Her work has been published in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Political Economy, and Review of International Economics.

Market Power Shifts Tariff Costs to Suppliers

Many studies have assumed that United States tariff costs are passed onto consumers. In new research, Vanessa Alviarez, Michele Fioretti, Ken Kikkawa, and Monica Morlacco argue that buyer-seller relationship dynamics allow dominant U.S. importers to instead force higher costs onto exporters.

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