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...

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....

This paper examines how trade protection is affected by changes in the value-added content of production arising through global value chains (GVCs). Exploiting a new set of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules adopted in 1995 that impose an exogenously timed requirement for countries to...

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...

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...

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 provides a legal-economic analysis of the Appellate Body decision in Brazil - Retreaded Tyres. We develop a simple economic model that we use to analyze the market structure and environmental externalities that were most relevant to this case. We start by analyzing Brazil's policies...

Suppose that when addressing the question of "what’s left for the WTO?," negotiators relied not on the agenda established in 2001 but instead on the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements to identify tariff negotiating priorities. This paper uses the lens of the terms-of-trade theory to...

First Japan, and more recently the People's Republic of China, have pursued exportoriented growth strategies. While other Asian countries have done likewise, the cases of Japan and the People's Republic of China are of particular interest because their economies are so large and the size of the...

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...