Yoto V. Yotov

I am the Royal H. Gibson Sr. Term Professor in Economics at the LeBow College of Business of Drexel University (Philadelphia, USA), a Research Professor at the ifo Institute (LMU, Munich, Germany), and a former member of the CEA of Bulgaria. My professional interests are in the areas of international trade, trade policy, and sanctions, with an emphasis on structural gravity modeling, estimation, and simulation. I find teaching very rewarding and I enjoy every bit of it, except for grading. On this web site, you can find information about my research, teaching, and advising & consulting activities, as well as about my "Gravity with Gravitas for Autism" initiative. I can be reached at yotov@drexel.edu.

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My “Gravity for Undergrads” Guide is now translated into 9 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, Arabic, Turkish, Bulgarian, Thai, and Farsi. I am very grateful to all the great collagues who volunteered to provide these public goods. The Guide is designed to introduce the gravity model to undergrads and novices in trade. It comes with data and code in Stata, R, and Python. We hope it is useful to colleagues and students. More information about the Chapter can be found HERE.

The GSDB team -- Aleksandra, Costas, Edral, Gabriel, Heider, Ohyun, and I -- are very happy to release the new (5th) version of the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB-R5), which includes 1,794 sanction cases, over the period 1949-2025. We also released the Global Sanctions Database - Financial Sanctions (GSDB-FS), which includes 1,072 cases of financial sancitons over the same period and classifies them in six types. For further details, please check "Financial Sanctions and International Trade: Insights from New Data".

After years in the making, I am happy to share a new guide for gravity estimations -- "Estimating Gravity Equations: Theory Implications, Econometric Developments, and Practical Recommendations" -- with Mario Larch and Serge Shikher. Some of our recommendations are motivated by trade theory, however, most of them should be useful more broadly, e.g., to analyze migration, FDI, cross-border patent flows, etc.