Katherine Stapleton

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About

Katherine Stapleton is an economist whose research sits at the intersection of automation, international trade, and multinational firm behavior. Her most notable contribution, "Automation, Trade and Multinational Activity: Micro Evidence from Spain," has established her as a significant voice in the growing literature on how technological change reshapes global economic activity. Using detailed firm-level data from Spain, Stapleton examines how automation influences trade patterns and the strategic decisions of multinational enterprises — a question of considerable policy relevance as robotics and artificial intelligence increasingly transform labor markets across developed economies. The original work has accumulated 57 citations since its 2020 publication, reflecting strong uptake within the fields of international economics and labor economics, and a subsequent iteration published in 2025 has already begun attracting attention with 7 citations. Stapleton's microeconomic approach, grounding macroeconomic questions in granular firm-level evidence, distinguishes her work and makes it particularly valuable to researchers and policymakers seeking to understand how automation interacts with globalization. Her contributions offer important empirical foundations for ongoing debates about technological displacement, offshoring, and industrial competitiveness.