Many nations have undergone significant trade liberalization even as they have increased their use of contingent protection measures. This raises the question of whether some of the trade liberalization efforts, at times accomplished through painful reforms, have been undone through a...

Many skeptics of trade liberalization in the developing world argue that lowering trade taxes can cause significant fiscal pressures in countries particularly reliant on these taxes and result in a reallocation of resources away from important development goals. This paper evaluates whether...

Advocates of antidumping (AD) laws downplay their negative effects by arguing that the trade flows that are subject to AD are small and their distortions negligible. But while the adverse effect of AD on product-level trade has long been established, the question remains whether there are trade...

This paper shows that electoral incentives deter politicians from supporting trade liberalization. We focus on all major trade liberalization bills introduced since the early 1970s in the U.S. Congress, in which House and Senate members serve respectively two- and six-year terms and one third of...

Democracies rarely engage in conflicts with one another, though they are not averse to fighting autocracies. We exploit the existence in many countries of executive term limits to show that electoral accountability is the key reason behind this "democratic peace" phenomenon. We construct a new...

We develop a simple model of trade relations in which legislators with different stakes in import-competing and export industries decide whether to grant fast-track authority (FTA) to the president, giving up the power to amend international trade agreements. We show that strategic delegation...

Antidumping: A recent phenomenon is the rapid spread of antidumping laws amongst developing countries (i.e. China, India, Mexico). Between 1980 and 2003 the number of countries in the world with an antidumping law in place more than doubled, going from 36 to 97 countries. This paper examines a...