Over the last three decades, the value of Chinese trade has approximately doubled every four years. This rapid growth has transformed the country from a negligible player in world trade to the world's second largest exporter, as well as a substantial importer of raw materials, intermediate...

Why do governments employ inefficient policies to redistribute income towards special interest groups (SIGs) when more efficient ones are available? To address this puzzle we derive and test predictions for a set of policies where detailed data is available and an efficiency ranking is feasible:...

This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organizations. We formally show that the PFS model predicts that the quantile regression of the...

Although many modern studies find large and significant effects of prior colonial status on bilateral trade, there is very little empirical research that has focused on the contemporaneous impact of empire on trade. We employ a new database of over 21,000 bilateral trade observations during the...

This paper presents a general equilibrium technique for the problem of ranking policies of a nation that trades with a foreign monopoly firm by presenting a generalization of the offer curve. The paper demonstrates the existence of a partial welfare ranking between ad valorem rates and specific...

We examine the sensitivity of simple calibration models of trade in imperfectly competitive industries to changes in model specification, as well as to changes in the calibration parameters. We find that not just the magnitude, but also the sign of the optimal trade policies is very sensitive to...

In this paper we consider a home government with political pressure to restrict trade, at the expense of foreigners. The foreign country is compensated with an income transfer, which can be thought of as a portion of the tariff revenues or quota rents. In this setting the two countries should...

The purpose of this paper is to describe United States trade policy since World War II, and to assess the possibility for ongoing U.S.trade-policy leadership. U.S. trade policy has shown remarkable consistency since World War II. It has never been as purely free-trade-focussed as some...

Free trade is not optimal for a small country that faces uncertain terms of trade if some factors are immobile - ex post, and markets for contingent claims are incomplete. The government can improve social welfare by using commercial policy that serves as a partial substitute for missing...

In the evolving debate and analysis of global imbalances, a commonly overlooked issue pertains to rising protectionism. This paper attempts to fill that gap, examining the macroeconomic implications of trade policy changes through the lens of a dynamic general equilibrium model of the world...