He then pursued PhD studies in economics at Harvard University, graduating in 2009 with a dissertation on the relationship between international trade and unemployment, inequality and redistribution under the advisorship of Elhanan Helpman, Gita Gopinath, Aleh Tsyvinski and Pol Antras.
[3] After his studies, Itskhoki worked as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, including as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2015–2017.
In 2019, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was honoured with the Venu and Ana Kotamraju Endowed Chair in Economics in 2020.
[7] Building on this model, Itskhoki, Helpman, Redding and Marc-Andreas Muendler find that firm employment size and trade participation are related to wage dispersion between firms, which drives the component of wage inequality within sectors and occupations, with the resulting distribution of wages and employment in Brazilian linked employer-employee data closely approximated by Helpman, Itskhoki and Redding's 2010 model.
[8] Moreover, in earlier work Itskhoki and Helpman have explored how labour market rigidities in a two-country, two-sector model of international trade affects unemployment.