International Economics Forum Moves to Georgia Tech
Posted October 28, 2026
The Forum for Research in Empirical International Trade (FREIT), an important organizer of global economics conferences, is now housed in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, giving the School increased visibility on a global scale.
The organization, led by Georgia Tech Professor Tibor Besedeš, has organized 92 conferences in eleven countries over its 32 years of existence. Economists from 400 institutions have presented approximately 1,300 papers at FREIT events.
“The roughly 850 economists who have presented or discussed a paper at a FREIT conference are not only trade economists in the narrow sense. They referee our papers, sit on editorial boards, write outside letters for our promotion cases, serve on grant panels, and advise the students we would like to recruit. Their sense of where Georgia Tech sits among economics departments is formed largely by incidental exposure, and there is now a good deal more of it,” Besedeš said.
For instance, the move means Georgia Tech will be named as the coordinating institution at FREIT’s upcoming conferences in Melbourne, Australia; Astana, Kazakhstan; Sardinia, Italy; Bloomington, Indiana; Seoul, Korea; and Tokyo.
FREIT, founded in 1994 at Purdue University, also holds a best graduate student paper competition every year at two of its conferences, the U.S.-based Empirical Investigations in International Trade and the Sardinian Empirical Trade Conference.
Past winners have come from Oxford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, Maryland, Brown, NYU, and Vanderbilt, among others. Many are now faculty presenting at the same conferences, Besedeš said.
“For me, the work is administrative rather than glamorous — coordinating seven conferences a year, maintaining the website, running the mailing list, and keeping the submission process working,” he said. “The compensation is that I see every paper submitted to every FREIT conference, which is a reasonable vantage point from which to watch a field. I get to see what the new ideas are, who are the new people entering the field, and I play a small role in helping shape both.”
For more information about FREIT, visit the organization’s website.
