When trade policy is determined endogenously by lobbying, it matters whether countries are arranged into a customs union or a free trade area. This paper compares the two regimes when the member governments are asymmetric in their susceptibilities to lobbying and in their bargaining power within...

The paper reports that an export subsidy is optimal for a unionized Bertrand duopoly. Following results published by Brander and Spencer (1988), this establishes the robustness of export subsidization to the mode of competition (Cournot or Bertrand), and contrasts with nonunion results in the...

A version of the small-union Meade model is presented to analyze the illegal immigration problem in the context of import tariffs. Two possible host nation objectives are considered: (i) to control the level of illegal immigration to a given target; or (ii) to choose an illegal immigration level...

Two exporting firms (domestic and foreign) are considered which are symmetric in all respects except that one is unionized while the other faces a competitive labor market. Under free trade the unionized firm has the lower market share. Paradoxically, in the policy equilibrium, the unionized...

This paper provides new estimates of the effects of ethnic networks on US exports. In line with recent research, our dataset is a panel of exports from US states to 29 foreign countries. Our analysis departs from the literature in two ways, both of which show that previous estimates of the...