What Globalization Leaves Behind

The landscape is mostly farms and tiny villages, the fields are dotted with medieval castles, and the Tour de France often whizzes by on its way to the Pyrenees, with their snow-covered peaks poking through the horizon. As a girl, Galdin always wanted to travel, and she dreamed of living in a big city and being a politician or working for the European Union. As she got older, that dream morphed into more of a dialogue between the city and the countryside, and she became interested in how international integration was impacting people all over the world. “I thought, there are so many things in our lives that have changed so quickly because the world is so much more integrated now,” she recalls, “and it’s always hard to measure the benefits and harms to consumers from this.” 

Today, as an assistant professor of business administration at Tuck, that curiosity is what drives Galdin’s research. She uses tools from empirical industrial organization—a field that examines competition, supply and demand, and sources of market power in individual industries—to study how products and services change in international markets. Within this area, she has a special focus on the breakdown of pharmaceutical supply chains and effects of digital labor platforms on service workers. 

The through-line is a deep concern for real people—whether they’re a casualty of a drug company’s decision to cut costs or set adrift by a technological revolution that’s transforming how work gets done.

Looking at Globalization Up Close

Galdin began her higher education at Sciences Po, one of the grande école institutions in France akin to Ivy League universities in the U.S. She spent her first two years at a regional campus in Dijon, studying law, economics, history and sociology, focused on issues in central and eastern Europe. After a third year studying in Prague, Galdin earned her master’s degree in economics from Sciences Po in Paris. During her master’s studies, Thomas Chaney, a professor of international trade, showed her how to mix macro models of globalization with micro data and do applied data analysis, and she wrote a master’s thesis on the trade of news between France and francophone Africa. Those experiences set her on a path to use uncommon data to answer large questions about the effect of global integration. 

Seeking more exposure to policy issues, Galdin took a gap year and worked for the French central bank, the European Commission, and the OECD. “I realized that a lot of the policymakers and people making important decisions around economic policy in international organizations had a PhD, which was not something people really did in France,” she says. She sought her doctorate in the U.S., taking a pre-doc fellowship with Rebecca Diamond at Stanford (Diamond is currently at Harvard). With Diamond, Galdin researched urban economic issues such as consumption segregation in the U.S., where people have different access to products based on where they live. 

Tracing the Roots of Drug Shortages 

In 2018, Galdin matriculated at Princeton for her PhD in economics. In her second year, she came across a perplexing problem: U.S. hospitals had been grappling with shortages of generic drugs for more than a decade, and policymakers still couldn’t explain why. They also did not know where the drugs exactly were being made, and by which manufacturing facilities. When she read about it in The Economist, she was struck by what seemed like an obvious gap. “They knew many of the drugs were produced outside the U.S.,” she says, “which meant they were clearing customs—so there had to be a paper trail.” 

Galdin began investigating the market, gaining access to very detailed customs data where she could see the contents inside shipments, doing text analysis of shipments to look for drug names, and mapping out the supply chain of global drugs consumed in the U.S. When she matched the drugs that were always in short supply with the plants manufacturing them, she saw that drugs produced by Asian manufacturing plants had a 54 percentage-point higher probability of shortages compared to their U.S. counterparts, with shortages lasting 130 more days on average. 

To understand why these offshored drugs had such supply problems—when most other items produced in Asia don’t suffer from shortages—Galdin built a model of global procurement. She found that hospital buyers place little weight on manufacturers’ shortage history and fail to acknowledge product reliability differentiation across generic versions of a drug. Meanwhile, offshoring allows drug makers to largely avoid regulatory oversight in exchange for lower production costs. In short, hospitals were choosing foreign-made, unreliable drugs because they were cheaper, and traceability issues in global supply chains made the identity and reliability of suppliers harder to contract on than prices. The solution, she found, was not to re-shore and pay more, but to enforce failure-to-supply penalties in contracts, which incentivize manufacturers to invest in plant reliability. “More than a globalization story, it’s a contracting failure story,” Galdin says. “I believe we can have generic drugs that are still cheaper than branded drugs but also good quality.” Her findings appear in her working paper “Resilience of Global Supply Chains and Generic Drug Shortages.” 

When AI Changes the Signal 

While writing that paper, Galdin began researching a very different topic: how digital labor platforms might benefit freelancers in Asia by giving them access to U.S. jobs that can be outsourced. But about 16 months after she and her co-author Jesse Silbert started working with data from Freelancer.com, the company launched a tool that allowed freelancers to use generative AI to write their job applications with one click. They decided to focus on the effects of that technology on the labor market. In the paper, “Making Talk Cheap: Generative AI and Labor Market Signaling,” which was covered in the Financial Times, The Atlantic, and The Economist, among other outlets, she and Silbert found that the generative AI tool reduced the signal value of a well-written application: almost anyone could appear qualified for the job. With employers less able to identify high quality workers, the market became less meritocratic, and workers in the top quintile of the ability distribution were hired 19 percent less often, while workers in the bottom quintile were hired 14 percent more often. 

These days, Galdin is expanding those two studies to drill deeper into the consequences of drug offshoring and generative AI. In the pharma area, she is investigating what happens to drugs made abroad that are recalled in the U.S. for quality problems. She is finding that foreign manufacturers are selling the recalled drugs to other, less regulated markets, such as in sub-Saharan Africa. On the AI front, Galdin is studying whether AI is making workers more productive or just replacing them. 

At Tuck, Galdin brings that same lens to her teaching, asking MBA students in her Managerial Economics course, which she co-teaches with Teresa Fort, to connect economic models to the decisions people make every day. “We are actually trying to think about the real-world application of economics,” she says.

This story originally appeared in print in the Summer 2026 issue of Tuck Today magazine.