Georgetown SFS-Q professor awarded prestigious fellowship

SFS-Q Professor Alexis Antoniades was recently awarded the prestigious Globalization and Governance Fellowship in Regional Political Economy from the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance.

The centre is located at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where Dr. Antoniades will be in residence during the 2012-2013 academic year. In addition, his recent article, “Local Versus Producer Currency Pricing: Evidence from Disaggregated Data” was also accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of one of the leading global economic journals, the International Economic Review.

These achievements mark the close of a very productive year of high-level economic research, including work on Multiproduct Firms and Economic Shocks: Long-Term Effects of a Short-Term Boycott, an innovative study which demonstrated that – contrary to conventional marketing wisdom – consumers not only think ethically but also engage in transactions based on their ethical convictions.

Professor Antoniades’ reasons for engaging in the study were related to the widely held belief in business studies that “boycotts do not matter”; in other words, that people talk ethically but do not purchase ethically. Professor Antoniades used the example of the 2006 boycott on Danish products in the Gulf region, precipitated by the Danish Cartoon controversy, to show that the ethical considerations of consumers were devastating for Danish firms.

By analyzing scanner-level data, assessed on a monthly basis, from 322 supermarkets and grocery stores in Saudi Arabia, Antoniades showed that the market share of Danish cheese products in the country went from 18% in the month before the boycott to 0% during the boycott.  Even four years after the end of the boycott, the share of Danish cheese products in Saudi Arabia remains at only 7%. The boycott did have a significant impact both in the short-run and in the long-run on consumption of Danish cheese products in the Gulf.

This study is part of a bigger research project that is funded by a three year, $1,050,000 research grant from the Qatar National Research Fund. The project, which Professor Antoniades has undertaken, is the first micro-study on the economies of Gulf countries.  Using scanner-level price and quantity data on Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) sold across thousands of outlets in Gulf countries, Antoniades investigates some of the biggest issues in international macroeconomics using micro-level data.

Since the data comes from the Gulf region, not only is Professor Antoniades able to make significant contributions to the field of economics, he is also able to enhance our understanding of the economies of the Gulf countries, and to promote Qatar as a global center of research excellence.

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