Oliver Krebs

ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher

Oliver Krebs, ETH Zurich, CESifo Guest from 16 to 20 February 2026.

Decoupling Global Value Chains

In this CESifo Working Paper (9079) Oliver Krebs, together with Peter Eppinger, Gabriel J. Felbermayr, and Bohdan Kukharskyy maintain that recent disruptions to global value chains (GVCs) have raised an important question: Can decoupling from GVCs increase a country’s welfare by reducing its exposure to foreign supply shocks? The researchers use a quantitative trade model to simulate GVCs decoupling, defined as increased barriers to global input trade. After decoupling, the repercussions of foreign supply shocks are reduced on average, but some countries experience magnified effects. Across various scenarios, welfare losses from decoupling far exceed any benefits from lower shock exposure. In the U.S., a repatriation of GVCs would reduce national welfare by 2.2% but barely change U.S. exposure to foreign shocks.

Mr. Krebs’s research focuses on international and regional trade and regional labor markets with a special focus on quantitative modeling and simulations as well as large data sets and recent advances in data science. Besides this, he is interested in economic geography, urban economics and trade policy questions. His work has been published, among others, in the Journal of International Economics and covered by media outlets such as VoxEU, FAZ, Spiegel, Atlantico, Ökonomenstimme and Wirtschaftsdienst. At CESifo he plans to work with the team of the Center for International Economics to improve available tools for quantitative simulations of international trade models for policy analysis.

Oliver Krebs is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the chair of Applied Economics: Innovation and Internationalisation at the ETH Zürich. He studied International Business Administration (BSc) at the University of Tübingen and International Economics and Business (MA) at the University of Passau. He completed his subsequent dissertation at the University of Würzburg with the thesis “Essays on International Trade, Regional Change and Structural Growth” (supervisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Pflüger). He has also been a research fellow at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IAW) in Tübingen and has worked as a consultant for projects at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) in Vienna, and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW).