Chengzi Yi's interest in the topic began before her PhD, during several years spent working at a commercial bank in China, managing corporate financing, and later at a trade company. That experience shaped how she thinks about economics: Firms, to her, were never abstract data points, but organisations facing very concrete constraints, from collateral requirements to the upfront costs of reaching new markets.
At the EUI Department of Economics, Chengzi studied how firms that produce multiple, differentiated products, such as wine or specialised machinery, decide whether exporting is worth it. Her research finds that the decision is often justified by a single standout product. Once a firm pays the fixed cost of exporting, thanks to that one product, it can bring its other, less profitable goods abroad too. Her work also shows that when a tariff hits one product, the damage tends to stay contained to that product for firms with highly differentiated goods, but spreads to their other products when the goods are more similar.
Chengzi believes economic research has a role to play in making policy debates more precise, especially as policymaking leans more on aggregate data that can mask how differently firms respond to the same shock. After completing her PhD, she is joining the National Bank of Slovakia, where she hopes her work will help clarify who is affected by trade policy, and through which mechanisms, without oversimplifying a complex reality.
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Chengzi Yi, from the EUI Department of Economics, has recently defended her PhD thesis ‘Investment and trade dynamics of heterogeneous firms', supervised by Professors Russell Cooper and Alexander Monge-Naranjo. She is currently joining the National Bank of Slovakia.