Portfolio on Jeremy Meng

UC Davis

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:41:51 +0000

International economics has long been a field with restricted entry. Entry has been restricted by such devices as “offer curves,” for which only the initiated know which is whose, but also by the sheer variety of models and effects that appear much more abundant than in other areas of applied economics. – by Robert Mundell

I am so lucky and proud to be perhaps the last generation of international economists to be trained and to have worked on all three areas: international macroeconomics, international finance, and international trade.

Economist (UC Davis Health)

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 04:00:59 +0000

In 2025, I worked as an Economist/Data Scientist with Manho Kang, Kadee Russ, and James Waters on a research project evaluating how Trump’s trade policy affected the cost of imported medical goods and the U.S. healthcare system.

Built a novel product-level trade policy database by extracting and standardizing information from 10,000+ pages of legal documents, creating a dataset with 10M+ records to track daily tariff changes across medical goods and source countries.
Developed an original procedure to identify roughly 300 medical product categories from more than 10,000 import classification codes, improving the accuracy and granularity of healthcare trade policy measurement.
Designed causal inference models to estimate tariff pass-through, demand elasticity, heterogeneous impacts across product groups, and the overall cost burden of trade policy on the U.S. healthcare system.
Created documentation, summary tables, and analytical outputs that translated complex legal, trade, and statistical information into clear evidence for economists, policy researchers, and healthcare stakeholders.

Economist (Queen's U)

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 03:44:30 +0000

As an Economist at Queen’s University, I worked on data-intensive research projects that transformed historical and administrative records into structured datasets for economic analysis. My work supported research on Canadian trade patterns and U.S. government procurement by improving the speed, reliability, and usability of the underlying data.

Delivered two data projects for research and policy analysis, including shortening a six-month ETL pipeline to three months by streamlining data ingestion and processing workflows.
Transformed 5,000+ pages of scanned records into analysis-ready structured data using systematic data cleaning, standardization, and validation procedures.
Built automated quality checks to improve data reliability and reduce errors before analysis.
Synthesized patterns in Canadian trade data and U.S. government procurement contract data into clear findings for research and policy stakeholders.
Contributed to the research data infrastructure needed to study trade, procurement, and regional economic outcomes.

UBC

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 02:54:19 +0000

I attended Vancouver School of Economics for its well-known masters program. Econometrics finally clicked for me after Vadim Marmer’s course, which used one of the best yet underrated econometrics textbooks, Econometric Theory and Methods by Davidson and MacKinnon. I was fascinated by combinatorial programming in structural IO from What Happens When Wal-Mart Comes to Town by Panle Jia, whom I deeply admired. I did more structural IO: BLP model and production function estimation.

Programming

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 04:48:29 +0000

I love computing and programming; I enjoy simulating my own models and implementing statistical methods not yet packaged, from scratch.

I am experienced with Python as well as the typical assortment of statistical programs (R, MATLAB, JULIA, STATA). I’m also comfortable using Docker via Podman, Git, Linux, and SQL.

I am fond of distributed cloud computing in Apache Spark via its SQL and DataFrame APIs. I am a frequent user of cloud platforms including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS (S3/EC2/Glue), and Google Cloud Platform.

Teaching Assistant

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 03:44:30 +0000

I have extensive teaching experience in economics at UC Davis and the University of British Columbia, covering introductory, intermediate, and upper-division courses in macroeconomics, microeconomics, finance, banking, international finance, East Asian economies, and industrial organization.

My teaching portfolio is here.

Served as a teaching assistant for Principles of Macroeconomics at UC Davis across multiple quarters, helping students build foundations in national income accounting, inflation, unemployment, fiscal policy, monetary policy, and economic growth.
Supported instruction in Intermediate Macroeconomics over six quarters, working with students on macroeconomic models, consumption and investment theory, business cycles, monetary policy, and open-economy macroeconomics.
Taught discussion sections and supported student learning in Intermediate Microeconomics, helping students understand consumer theory, producer theory, market equilibrium, welfare analysis, and strategic decision-making.
Assisted upper-division courses in Financial Economics, Money and Banking, and International Finance, connecting economic theory to asset pricing, financial markets, central banking, exchange rates, and global capital flows.
Broadened my teaching portfolio through courses on the Economy of East Asia and Industrial Organization, covering regional economic development, firm behavior, competition, market structure, and policy-relevant applications.
Developed experience explaining technical economic concepts to students with different levels of preparation, including through grading, office hours, discussion sections, exam review, and one-on-one support.

Queen's University

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 02:32:21 +0000

I went to Queen’s University for my undergraduate. I was lucky to be able to do several independent projects mentored by some of the best Canadian economists.

Awards

Top graduates (departmental graduation honourable mention)
Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship
Edith Whyte Memorial Scholarship in Economics
Don Wood Undergraduate Scholarship in Economics
Dean’s Special Award, Queen’s University

Leadership Positions

Lions Club (president)
Collection Reflections (co-editor)
Providence Manor (volunteer leads)
Open-day Representative (QED)
Admission Center (Work Duty)

De Minimis Import Intelligence and Prediction

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:49:20 +0000

Uncertainty hurts!

This project develops a platform to monitor trade policy, exploiting my domain expertise, by providing updates and predictions. I estimated tree-based ML models and standard univariate models for over 10,000 internationally traded products.

Built on the GCP platform for storing model artifacts and underlying data; an LLM-powered RAG makes querying and understanding model results as simple as asking for the trade intelligence of product X, of your choice.

AI

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 14:31:00 +0000

I try to stay at the forefront of the AI evolution. I have built some of the following.

RAG based on Langchain or Langgraph
Context graph using Neo4j
Auto system prompt optimization

I also coded and deployed some end-to-end apps. One is an accent reduction app—AccentFab— focusing on intonation training based on approaches from renowned language coach Dr. David Alan Stern.

Coffee Co.

Sat, 11 Jul 2015 04:36:44 +0000

I was professionally trained as a barista, certified by the Canadian Coffee Academy, and constantly mentored by Rich Ottenhof, an expert in speciality coffee.

It was at that time that I also got interested in the international commodity market, including coffee. I wrote my very first market research report on the coffee market and built my statistical model according to Box-Jenkins practice to forecast coffee prices.

Applied Econometrics

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:44:16 +0000

I am an expert in a wide range of tools in applied econometrics for predictive and cause-and-effect types of questions using various data types, including spatial panel, longitudinal data, and time series.

I am interested in collecting and constructing my own data, often being the first in specific domains, to best answer the questions at hand.

Although frameworks like propensity score matching, staggered diff-in-diffs, event studies, and synthetic controls are in my arsenal, I am interested in deeply understanding the nature of the problem and discovering natural experiments in observational data to understand causes and effects.

Production Assistant (Persephone Market Garden)

Wed, 11 Jul 2018 04:36:44 +0000

As a production assistant, I gained hands-on experience in small-scale organic farming, working across the full production cycle from seeding and transplanting to weeding, harvesting, and delivering products to customers. The experience gave me practical exposure to sustainable agriculture, daily operations, and the challenges of running a small farm.

Supported organic crop production through seeding, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, and post-harvest handling.
Helped manage daily farm operations, including livestock care, field maintenance, and product preparation.
Delivered farm products to customers and gained experience communicating directly with local consumers.
Participated in workshops with other farm apprentices, learning how farmers use technical knowledge from biology, ecology, and other fields to improve small-scale organic farming.
Developed a stronger appreciation for operational problem-solving, sustainable food systems, and the role of interdisciplinary knowledge in farming.

Could Tariffs Provide a Stimulus? In Search of Elusive Benefits of Protectionism

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:55:34 +0000

In this paper, I study whether tariffs can stimulate the domestic economy by raising demand for domestic goods. The project examines a central policy question in international macroeconomics: can protectionist trade policy increase output and employment, or do higher prices and distortions outweigh any expansionary effects? Open access here.

Built a structural macroeconomic model to study how tariffs affect domestic prices, import demand, production, and welfare.
Modeled the pricing decisions of producers and retailers to examine how tariff costs pass through from imported inputs and final goods to consumer prices.
Compared the potential stimulus effect from import substitution with the negative effects of higher prices, reduced purchasing power, and lower consumer welfare.
Studied how tariff pass-through depends on market structure, supply chain exposure, and the ability of firms to absorb or transmit cost increases.
Used model-based counterfactuals to evaluate whether tariffs can generate aggregate demand effects similar to fiscal stimulus.
Showed that tariffs may shift spending toward domestic producers in some settings, but they also create price distortions and welfare losses that limit their effectiveness as a stimulus tool.

Economic Impacts of Trump's 2025 Tariffs

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 02:04:23 +0000

In this research project, I created a new procedure to reliably track daily changes in trade policy, explicitly distinguishing between detailed timing up to the minute of announcement and implementation. This comes from processing 10K+ pages of trade documents.

Focusing on medical goods, we estimate the tariff pass-through (i.e. demand elasticity in a broader sense) in a diff-in-diffs framework.

Abstract: Have recent tariffs resulted in increased costs for the US healthcare system? We examine US trade data and compile a database of statutory tariff changes. Tariffs on medical goods narrowly defined resulted in $3.4 Billion in duties assessed between February and July 2025–more than 10 times the same period in 2024, with a 55.8 percent rate of pass-through at the US border. We estimate that had medical goods imports observed in 2024 been subject to the statutory tariff levels prevailing in August 2025, assessed duties would have been $15.8 Billion, 30 times higher than those observed in real-time.
The replication codebase is open access here.
A local copy is also available here.

Benchmark Inclusion and Sovereign Risk

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 02:17:20 +0000

I study how financial benchmark index inclusion affects sovereign bond markets and sovereign risk. The project examines whether being included in widely followed bond indices changes investor demand, capital flows, and borrowing costs for sovereign governments. A local copy is open access here.

Built a country-month panel dataset combining sovereign bond yields, sovereign spreads, benchmark index membership, index weights, and mutual fund holdings data. The dataset links global investment benchmarks to actual portfolio allocation decisions and sovereign debt market outcomes.
Used event study methods to examine how sovereign bond markets respond around benchmark inclusion and exclusion events. This approach helps identify whether changes in index status are associated with shifts in bond yields, spreads, and investor demand.
Developed a shift-share instrumental variable strategy based on benchmark exposure and global index-tracking flows. This method uses variation in countries’ exposure to benchmark-driven demand to estimate the effect of foreign investor demand on sovereign borrowing costs.
Estimated foreign demand elasticity for sovereign bonds by analyzing how global investors reallocate portfolios when benchmark weights change. This helps quantify how sensitive sovereign debt prices are to changes in institutional investor demand.
Examined spillover and network effects across countries by studying how index-driven capital flows affect not only included countries, but also countries that compete for global portfolio investment. This highlights the broader market consequences of benchmark-based investing.
Connected the empirical analysis to a sovereign credit risk framework to interpret how financial integration, investor demand, and benchmark inclusion can affect sovereign risk premia.

Tariff Pass-through at the Dock and at the Store

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 22:55:34 +0000

In this paper, I study why U.S. tariffs during the U.S.-China trade war were passed through strongly to import prices at the dock but only weakly to consumer prices at the store. The project examines how pricing frictions and strategic interactions between producers and retailers shape the transmission of trade policy shocks across the supply chain. Open access here.

Built a multi-country model with retail sectors to study tariff pass-through at both the import and consumer price levels.
Modeled nominal frictions faced by upstream producers and downstream retailers to explain why tariffs affect prices differently across stages of the supply chain.
Introduced strategic pricing complementarities between vertically related firms, where tariff-induced increases in retail prices incentivize upstream producers to raise their own prices.
Showed that producer-retailer pricing interactions amplify tariff pass-through at the dock while limiting pass-through to final consumer prices.
Used the model to reconcile the observed pattern of high tariff pass-through into import prices and low pass-through into store-level prices during the U.S.-China trade war.
Contributed to the literature on trade policy, price rigidity, and international macroeconomics by showing how vertical pricing relationships shape the real effects of tariffs.

Fiscal Spending and Growth: New Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 22:55:34 +0000

In this paper, I study the long-term economic effects of temporary government spending shocks by using the surge in U.S. government procurement during World War I as a natural experiment. The project asks whether short-lived fiscal spending can create persistent improvements in regional economic activity, or whether its effects disappear once the spending shock ends.

Digitized over 10,000 historical procurement contracts to construct original state-level measures of government spending exposure during World War I.
Used cross-state variation in wartime procurement spending as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of temporary fiscal shocks on regional growth.
Built a state-level historical panel linking government spending shocks to subsequent changes in personal income, employment, and regional economic outcomes.
Estimated the dynamic effects of government spending over time, showing that temporary spending shocks led to sustained increases in personal income and employment.
Found that the effects persisted even seven years after the initial spending shock, suggesting that temporary fiscal interventions can generate longer-lasting regional growth.
Contributed new evidence to the debate on fiscal multipliers, regional development, and whether government spending can have persistent effects beyond the short-run demand response.

Trade Policy and Macroeconomy

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 22:55:34 +0000

In this review article, I examine the relationship between trade policy and macroeconomic outcomes, focusing on how tariffs, trade barriers, and international policy changes affect aggregate prices, output, exchange rates, and welfare. The article was published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance.

Reviewed theoretical and empirical research on how trade policy affects macroeconomic outcomes.
Synthesized evidence on tariff pass-through, exchange rate adjustment, welfare effects, and the interaction between trade policy and monetary policy.
Connected micro-level evidence on firm and consumer responses to macroeconomic models of aggregate trade policy effects.
Discussed how trade policy shocks can affect inflation, output, terms of trade, and international capital flows.
Contributed a structured overview for researchers, students, and policy readers interested in the macroeconomic consequences of trade policy.