There is no consensus in the literature on trade agreements as to whether preferential liberalization leads to more or less multilateral liberalization. Research has focused mostly on tariff measures of import protection. We develop more comprehensive measures of trade policy that include the...

Cross-border supply chains and international trade enabled the manufacturing and delivery of billions of vaccine doses to inoculate the world against COVID-19. At the same time, the pandemic revealed how the World Trade Organization (WTO) must change to become more useful in the face of a public...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the US government used novel policies to accelerate research, development, and production of a diversified portfolio of new vaccines. This paper begins by describing the Defense Production Act (DPA) of 1950 and the initial “priority-rated” contracts...

We uncover evidence that the US-China trade war was consequential for voting outcomes in the 2018 congressional midterm election. Republican House candidates lost support in counties more exposed to tariff retaliation, but saw no appreciable gains in counties that received more direct US tariff...

How does trade policy treat intermediate inputs relative to other imported products? Slow economic and trade growth during the recovery from the Great Recession, as well as recent political developments in the United Kingdom and the United States, pose a threat to cross-border supply chains and...

The Trump administration changed US trade policy toward China in ways that will take years for researchers to sort out. This paper makes four specific contributions to that research agenda. First, it carefully marks the timing, definitions, and scale of the products subject to the tariff changes...

US labor force participation has been weak in recent decades, especially during the recovery of the financial crisis of 2007–09. This paper examines several programs that governments in other advanced industrial countries have established to help jobless workers continue to seek employment,...

Despite more robust growth than many advanced economies in Europe and Asia, labor force participation in the United States between 1995 and 2017 was weak. In other countries, job loss has manifested itself as increased unemployment as opposed to labor force exit. For men, the decline in labor...

South Korea felt "betrayed" when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed his administration's flagship climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, into law. This paper first shows how the Biden administration addressed Korea's concerns about the law's effect on its sales of...

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 provoked a transatlantic trade spat. After the law was passed, the Biden administration addressed some of the concerns raised by the European Union by writing controversial rules to implement the legislation. These regulations are expected to have...