Saera Oh, Ph.D. Candidate
Major Professor: Nicole Mason-Wardell
Area of Specialization: International Trade, Trade Policy
Expected Graduation Date: May 2026
Personal website: https://sroh722.github.io/
Publications on Google Scholar
Saera Oh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics (AFRE) with a dual major in Economics at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on international trade, examining heterogeneous trade patterns and the effects of geopolitical events on both firm-level and aggregate trade, as well as the impacts of trade and trade policy on resource use. She is advised by Dr. Nicole Mason-Wardell (AFRE) and Dr. Oren Ziv (Economics). In her job market paper, she examines how internal firm distance costs shape the geography of FDI and the export behavior of multinational affiliates. Using shipment-level export data from India, she documents evolving patterns of related-party trade and builds a model that yields a firm-level gravity equation with heterogeneous distance elasticities between related-party and arm’s-length exports, consistent with the empirical facts. Her estimates show that within-firm exports are less sensitive to distance, but that this gap has narrowed over time, reflecting a growing shift toward inter-firm trade among foreign affiliates.
One of her dissertation chapters, Geopolitical risks and agricultural trade diversification in Southern Africa: Port-level evidence from the Russia-Ukraine war (with Sunghun Lim), analyzes port-level wheat imports following the Russia–Ukraine war. The study finds that South Africa diversified its sources of wheat imports, sustaining regional supplies but at the cost of greater volatility. This chapter has been published in the Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a researcher at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, where she gained practical experience with international commerce and trade policy. She holds a Master’s degree in Economics and a Bachelor’s degree from Seoul National University.