Hâle Utar, Second Vice President

Hâle Utar is a Professor of Economics at Grinnell College and holds the Sidney Meyer Endowed Chair in International Economics. She is also a Research Fellow at IZA, CESifo, ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin, and serves as an Associate Editor at The Review of International Economics. She previously served on the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Bielefeld University. She holds a PhD from Pennsylvania State University and an undergraduate degree from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.

Her research examines how globalization, technological change, and shifts in the macroeconomic environment reshape firms, industries, and labor markets. A central focus of her work is understanding how international trade alters production organization, competitive dynamics, firm performance, and economic opportunities for workers and households.

Professor Utar's current research agenda centers on adjustments of global value chains in the new era of rising protectionism and automation. Her latest publication, The US-China Trade War and the Relocation of the Global Value Chains to Mexico (Utar, Cebreros, and Torres, 2025, ReStat), shows that the 2018–19 US tariff hikes on Chinese goods triggered significant export growth from Mexico to the US, driven entirely by firms embedded in global value chains — particularly foreign multinationals in technology-intensive industries — highlighting a restructuring of integrated production networks with Mexico emerging as a key beneficiary.