This dissertation studies the use of the US antidumping (AD) legislation. In the first chapter, I use panel data on AD petitions filed by US industries from 1980 to1995 to study the determinants of antidumping filings. I argue that a negative binomial model is better suited to study the...

The electronics sector has played an important role in the development trajectories of several newly industrialized economies. South Asia’s lack of competitiveness reflects inadequate provision of public goods (e.g. industrial zones next to world class ports and urban centers) rather than high...

This report examines how Nepal could move away from a remittance-driven growth model by reforming its trade policies to increase competitiveness. It looks at the extent to which Nepal has been tapping into its trade potentials, the underlying obstacles that it faces, and the type of reforms that...

Incorporating intermediate inputs into a small-union general-equilibrium model, this paper first develops the welfare economics of preferential trading under the rules of origin (ROO) and then demonstrates that the ROO could improve the political viability of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Two...

Bradford DeLong and Dani Rodrik have argued that reforms in India cannot be credited with higher growth because the growth rate crossed the 5 percent mark in the 1980s, well before the launch of the July 1991 reforms. This is a wrong reading of the Indian experience for two reasons. First,...

We study the implications of loss aversion for trade policy determination and show how it allows us to explain a number of important and puzzling features of trade policy. An important question concerning trade policy is why a disproportionate share of protection goes to declining industries. We...

Economic reforms along with its promise of increasing income and growth rates have also raised concerns about its distributional implications. These concerns are at the heart of the arguments of those who oppose certain economic reforms. Focusing on the economic reforms implemented in India, we...

In this dissertation I assess the impact of developing country trade liberalization on their wage inequality by focusing on two possible channels, namely job formality and inter-industry wage premium. Informal workers are a large share of the workforce, more than 30% in Brazil and Colombia, and...

Policy commitment and credibility are important for inducing agents to make costly, irreversible investments. Policy uncertainty can delay investment and reduce the response to policy change. I provide theoretical and novel quantitative evidence for these effects by focusing on trade policy, a...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are characterized by liberalization with respect to only a few partners and thus they can potentially clash with, and retard multilateral trade liberalization (MTL). Yet there is almost no systematic evidence on whether the numerous existing PTAs actually...