Is there evidence from China's pre-WTO accession period that newly imposed U.S. or EU import restrictions deflect Chinese exports to third markets? We examine this question by drawing on a newly constructed data set of U.S. and EU product-level import restrictions on Chinese trade imposed...

This paper examines ethics in international trade from several different ethical perspectives, including consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics and deontology. The views of Aristotle, Plato, Adam Smith, Bentham, Kant, Pareto, Rawls, Flew, Nozick, Bastiat and others are discussed and...

China's deepening engagement in the global trading system and the threat of its export capacity have affected the negotiation, formation, and rules of international trade agreements. Among other changes, China's 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) introduced new allowances for...

This paper addresses the issue of whether Donald Trump should impose a 35% tariff on the importation of certain goods from China and Mexico, and presumably other countries. Applying utilitarian ethics leads to the conclusion that the tariff should not be imposed. The same result is obtained by...

The US-China trade war forced a reluctant semiconductor industry into someone else’s fight, a very different position from its leading role in the 1980s trade conflict with Japan. This paper describes how the political economy of the global semiconductor industry has evolved since the 1980s....

The Bagwell and Staiger (1990) theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts new tariffs (i) increase with imports, (ii) increase with the inverse of the sum of the import demand and export supply elasticities, and (iii) decrease with the variance of imports. We find US import policy during...

This paper examines implications of the terms-of-trade theory for the determinants of outcomes arising under the enforcement provisions of international agreements. Like original trade agreement negotiations, we model formal trade dispute negotiations as potentially addressing the terms-of-trade...

We find that Republican candidates lost support in the 2018 congressional election in counties more exposed to trade retaliation, but saw no commensurate electoral gains from US tariff protection. The electoral losses were driven by retaliatory tariffs on agricultural products, and were only...

This paper focuses on the adjustment environment in the United States as set out by the active U.S. trade remedy laws (antidumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards) and the Trade Adjustment Assistance program. We document U.S. industries' use of these various laws and relate industry use...

The World Trade Organization, which came into existence at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, is in charge of administering a plethora of new trade rules. The main thrust of the new rules is to reduce or abolish tariffs and quotas on a wide range of products. Some tariffs and quotas were...