This paper examines whether and how rainfall shocks affect tariff setting in the agricultural sector. In a model of strategic trade policy, the authors show that the impact of a negative rainfall shock on optimal import tariffs is generally ambiguous, depending on the weight placed by the...

Most migration surveys do not ask about the legal status of migrants due to concerns about the sensitivity of this question. List randomization is a technique that has been used in a number of other social science applications to elicit sensitive information. This paper trials this technique by...

This paper examines the effects of a government regularization program offered to half a million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. For this purpose, 2,232 surveys of refugee families were collected and used to compare refugees who arrived in Colombia around a specified eligibility date in 2018....

The authors analyze recent efforts at international cooperation to limit illegal migration, particularly through the use of legal migration avenues like guest worker schemes. They show that while guest worker schemes may be desirable as an avenue of international migration, they are an...

There is not yet consensus in the trade agreements literature as to whether preferential liberalization leads to more or less multilateral liberalization. However, research thus far has focused mostly on tariff measures of import protection. This paper develops more comprehensive measures of...

The WTO has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand-off, where the WTO has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage, and...

Preferential trade agreements today are more numerous and deeper than they were a quarter century ago. Do deep agreements promote countries' integration into global value chains? What are the economic mechanisms? How do countries choose their trade agreement partners? Would the undoing of deep...

How do international economic agreements influence the investment patterns of firms from emerging economies? This paper studies the ways in which bilateral investment treaties and preferential trade agreements interact with geographic and cultural distance to influence firms' investment...

Preferential trade agreements are an important feature of the global trade system. Several questions, ranging from the rationale for preferential arrangements to their impact on members, non-members and the broader multilateral trade system, are at the forefront of academic and policy debates in...