Assume that government maximizes the well being of its citizens subject to technological, political, and informational constraints. How should equilibrium be perturbed so that equilibrium post-perturbation quantities satisfy new exogenously-specified bounds? We prove an intervention principle...

This paper identifies the most restrictive limit that rules of origin can enforce and still continue to guarantee gains from trade for free trade area formation in general settings. Many commonly used rules of origin exceed this condition in practice. Second, free trade areas generally involve...

We use a multi-country asymmetric oligopolistic framework for segmented markets to study the welfare effects of reducing tariff discriminations - which we call a move towards Most Favored Nation tariffs. Both unilateral and multilateral reforms are considered. We investigate this issue under...

The number of preferential trade agreements has greatly increased over the past two decades, yet most existing bilateral arrangements take the form of free trade areas, and less than ten percent can be considered to be fully °edged customs unions. This paper develops a political economy model...

Measuring the effects of international trade on labor market outcomes has never been more important given the increasing interconnections among economies around the globe. However, using measures of exposure to trade flows based on gross exports may lead to a misleading picture given that...