Keliang Xiao

I am Keliang Xiao, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Agricultural & Consumer Economics (ACE) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Professor William Ridley. I am on the 2026–2027 job market.

My research is at the intersection of international trade and environmental economics, focusing on how trade policy incentives shape environmental outcomes such as agricultural emissions and land-use change. More broadly, I am interested in how environmental externalities can be better accounted for in trade policy and economic development.

In my job market paper, “Trade Policy and the Emissions Content of Agricultural Trade” (with William Ridley and Doyoung Park; submitted to Resource and Energy Economics), I use a structural gravity model linked to country-commodity farm-gate emissions data to study how tariffs shape greenhouse gas emissions embodied in agricultural trade. I find that existing tariff preferences raise embodied emissions by 37.9 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent annually, about $3.4 billion at recent carbon-border prices, driven largely by livestock and beef trade. Continued trade liberalization, by contrast, would raise emissions by a further 17.7 megatonnes, driven mainly by crops such as rice. These results show that the current global tariff regime, not merely the existence of trade itself, shapes the environmental consequences of agricultural trade.

I hold a Graduate Minor in Statistics from UIUC, an M.A. in Applied Economics from Sun Yat-Sen University, and a B.A. in Economics from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.