Rohan Shah is a sixth-year graduate student in the Department of Economics at the Ohio State University. He received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Warwick. Before joining the Department, he worked in antitrust consulting in London, where he worked on cases involving Google, DuPont, Imperial Tobacco, among others.
Shah’s current research areas are macroeconomics and industrial organization. His research focuses on firm’s decisions to invest in research and development (R&D) and the impact those decisions have on long-run output, recoveries from recessions, and the firms’ own lifecycles. One of his projects examines the effect of government R&D subsidies on economic aggregates and firm lifecycles. Calibrating a model with firms that are heterogeneous in their stocks of physical capital, R&D, and debt to the US economy, he finds that large increases in the level of R&D subsidies raise the number of firms that conduct R&D but only have a small (positive) effect on aggregate output due to large firms cutting back on their R&D investments. Another ongoing project of his examines the extent to which the decrease in introductions of new products (via a reduction in R&D spending) can explain the slow recovery from the Great Recession.
Shah has presented at various conferences for the Institute for Humane Studies and his co-authors have presented their joint research at the Central Bank of the Dominican Republic and The Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom at Southern Methodist University. For this summer, Shah will have a PhD Dissertation Internship at the Kansas City Federal Reserve. In addition to his own research and coursework, Shah is teaching assistant for several of the department’s courses including the graduate macroeconomics course for first-year PhD students.
This year, Shah was honored to be the inaugural recipient of the Professor J. Graham Smith Memorial Prize in Applied Economics.
