Stephen Redding's research interests include international trade, economic geography, and productivity growth at the firm and industry level. Recent work has examined the interaction of comparative advantage and heterogeneous firms' responses to international trade; the importance of multi-product firms for productivity growth and the effects of trade liberalisation; and the contribution of agglomeration forces to the spatial distribution of economic activity within and across cities. 

He is currently the Harold T. Shapiro *64 Professor in Economics in the Economics Department and Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and Director of the International Trade and Investment (ITI) Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is an International Research Associate of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a Research Associate of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and an International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

Prior to joining Princeton University, he was a Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and the Yale School of Management. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellowship during 2001-4 for his research on international trade and economic growth and a Global Economic Affairs Prize from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in 2008. He was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Economics, Harvard University during Fall 2007 and a Peter Kenen Fellow in International Economics at Princeton University during 2005-6. He also worked as a research economist at the Bank of England, where his research on the relationship between international openness and economic growth was published as Openness and Growth, (eds) Proudman and Redding, Bank of England, London.

Publications in academic journals include the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of the European Economic Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, International Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics.