Prof. Christopher Clayton Wins Award for Research on Geoeconomics
In a 2023 paper, Clayton and two co-authors offered a mathematical model to understand how great powers exert economic pressure on other countries.
Christopher Clayton, assistant professor of finance, has won the 2024 Best Paper Award in Geoeconomics for his working paper “A Framework for Geoeconomics,” which explores the methods by which governments use economic tools to achieve political goals.
Established this year and aimed at junior researchers, the prize is conferred jointly by the Università Bocconi, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
In the winning study, issued as part of the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Papers Series, Clayton and his co-authors, Matteo Maggiori of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Jess Schreger of Columbia Business School, offer a mathematical model to conceptualize how great powers use their economic might to extract financial or political concessions from other countries. The paper then explores two real-world applications of the model, using it to explore China’s global infrastructure investments through its Belt and Road Initiative and the United States’ demand that European governments curb their imports of Chinese technology.
Clayton, who joined the Yale SOM faculty in 2020 after receiving his PhD at Harvard University, studies international finance and macroeconomics, with a focus on reserve currency internationalization, multinational banking, and monetary policy. He has previously received the 2020 AQR Top Finance Graduate Award.