Goldberg was appointed by Jim Yong Kim as the chief economist of the World Bank on April 27, 2018, and joined in November 2018.
More recently, she has studied the impact of trade liberalization on growth and the income distribution,[15] the effects of intellectual property rights enforcement in developing countries, and the determinants of incomplete exchange-rate pass-through.
[3] In joint work with Nina Pavcnik, Amit Khandelwal, Petia Topalova, and Jan De Loecker, Goldberg has studied the effects of the 1990s trade liberalization in India on domestic production and the variety of products available in the domestic Indian market[16] and on the costs faced by Indian producers.
[17] In a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2020, jointly written with economists Pablo K. Fajgelbaum, Patrick J. Kennedy, and Amit K. Khandelwal, Goldberg analyzed the effects of the 2018 Trump tariffs and China–United States trade war on the US economy and estimated losses of $68.8 billion to consumers and producers due to higher prices.
The total effect, which also accounts for the benefits of higher prices to US producers and government revenue from tariffs, was estimated to be $7.8 billion.