James Lake

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Southern Methodist University. I have been a faculty member here since finishing my PhD at Johns Hopkins University in 2012. For my undergraduate and Master's degrees, I studied at Monash University in Australia.

My research focuses on international trade agreements. This includes why countries form Free Trade Agreements and Customs Unions and how the recent proliferation of such agreements interacts with multilateral negotiations via the WTO in affecting the possibility of global free trade. It also includes research on the distributional effects that trade agreements have among different segments of a country’s population and how the ensuing political economy ramifications affect trade policy.