I have spent my career studying how countries join the world economy. I have spent the last decade watching them leave it.
That was not the plan. I trained as a trade economist in the years when integration looked like a ratchet that only turned one way — I worked on Ukraine’s accession to the WTO, on services liberalization, on the productivity gains that arrive when firms are finally exposed to competition. The interesting question back then was how fast the gains came and who captured them.
Then the UK voted to leave the EU, Washington and Beijing started raising tariffs at each other, and Russia invaded Ukraine. The machinery I had spent fifteen years learning to measure was running in reverse. It turns out the tools work in both directions.
What I work on
Brexit — what leaving actually cost, measured rather than asserted. Using a synthetic difference-in-differences design, my co-authors and I find that Brexit-related policy uncertainty reduced UK services exports by 9.2% a year on average — a cumulative loss of roughly $146.8 billion between 2016 and 2019, distinct from and larger than the effect of the tariff and non-tariff barriers that eventually took effect. It also reduced trade in goods by 15% a year, with adjustments working through varieties rather than volumes. Small firms were hit the hardest.
Trade wars — how geopolitical alignment reshapes trade, and what happens when allies use market access as leverage. Recent work on the January 2026 Greenland tariff episode found the UK has no effective response to economic coercion from friendly states, and that retaliation would have cost the average household.
Ukraine — export diversification, market access, and reconstruction. I am part of the Economists for Ukraine group. I am working on a project that studies cost of port blockade on Ukrainian exports. As Lead Economist at the Foreign Trade Research Center (Trade+) at the Kyiv School of Economics, I worked on where Ukrainian exports could go and what was stopping them from getting there.
The through-line is methodological as much as thematic: gravity models, firm-level microdata, and quasi-experimental designs applied to questions where the counterfactual is genuinely hard and the policy stakes are real.
Currently
Reader in Economics at Aston Business School and Centre Director of the Centre for Business Prosperity.
I also advise governments, firms, and institutions on trade policy — see Consultancy.
Before that
Aston University — Senior Lecturer and Lecturer in Economics, 2018–2024
Kyiv School of Economics — Lead Economist, Foreign Trade Research Center (Trade+) 2019-2022; previously Assistant Professor of Economics, 2006–2013
University of Bradford — Lecturer in Economics, 2013–2017
Higher School of Economics — Professor of Economics, Moscow; Lead Economist, Centre for Market Studies and Spatial Economics, St Petersburg, 2013
The World Bank — Development Research Group, Trade unit
Education
PhD, Economics — University of Maryland, 2006
MA, Economics — New Economic School, Moscow, 1999
How I work
Almost everything I do runs on R. I build gravity models and firm-level panels, and I teach the methods as well as use them — including a workshop series at Aston on regression analysis, visualisation with ggplot, and reproducible reporting in Markdown. This site is itself built in Quarto, which tells you roughly where I sit on the spectrum between economist and data person.
I care about work that survives contact with a policy audience. A result that cannot be explained to a permanent secretary in three sentences is a result that will not change anything.
Contact
shepotylo@gmail.com for consultancy, media, and speaking. o.shepotylo@aston.ac.uk for academic correspondence.