Sunday, February 8, 2026

Thrilled that Our Paper on Tariffs and Effects on Labor in Supply Chains is Published Free Access in JORS!

My Isenberg School of Management PhD student, Samira Samadi, and I are thrilled that our paper on ad valorem tariffs and their effects on labor in competitive supply chains is now published in the Journal of Operational Research (JORS). JORS is the flagship journal of the Operational Research Society, which is based in the United Kingdom.

The paper is titled, "Ad Valorem Tariffs in Global Supply Chain Networks and Impacts on Labor." The model is a game theory one of firms competing in an oligopolistic manner, each one seeking to maximize its profits, in the presence of tariffs. The firms seek to determine the optimal production of commodities and their distribution as well as the labor needed, with wages and productivity of labor included.

Illustrative examples are provided along with a global soybean trade case study. Numerical results reveal how such tariffs shift trade flows, reshape labor allocation, and affect demand prices as well as profits, with labor shortages and cost disruptions further negatively compounding the effects.



The Editor in Chief, (EIC) of JORS, Kostas Nikolopoulos of Durham University, has kindly made the paper free access and the link to it is below: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01605682.2025.2592758

With tariffs having wide impacts, both locally and globally, this is one of the very first papers to quantify the effects on labor, trade flows, and profits. We thank the EIC for the expert handling of our paper as well as the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on the original paper.