Dr Edward Wiles
Kennedy Scholar
MIT combined outstanding academic rigour with a deeply supportive and collegial culture in a way that I had never previously experienced. I found this profoundly inspiring and hope that I can contribute to building a similar philosophy as I develop my own career.
Edward Wiles is an economist who studies how small businesses in lower- and middle-income countries participate in international and domestic trade. His research combines large-scale, real-world experiments and policy reforms with economic models to understand the challenges that firms face and how policymakers and organizations can help overcome them.
In a recent research project aiming to measure the importance of search and trust frictions in international trade, and how new digital technologies can help firms overcome them, he designed and ran an experiment using WhatsApp groups to connect over 1,500 small garment businesses in Senegal to new suppliers in Türkiye and to provide additional information about these new suppliers. In another recent project, he is using data capturing firm-to-firm trade between all formal-sector businesses in India to study how a 2017 tax reform lowered the cost of finding suppliers and customers in other states.
Edward is currently a postdoctoral Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at Harvard University. He first went to the United States as a Kennedy Scholar in 2019 to begin a PhD in Economics at MIT, which he completed in 2025. Prior to this, he completed Masters and Bachelors degrees in Economics at the London School of Economics.
Dr Edward Wiles
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