Data on campaign contributions of PACs (political action committees) in the US does not contain the PACs' issues of concern. Additionally, while recent US lobbying data details the issues of concern for an interest group, it does not detail the Congressional representatives lobbied by the...

Even if free trade creates net welfare gains for a country as a whole, the associated distributional implications can undermine the political viability of free trade. We show that trade-related redistribution -- as presently constituted -- modestly increases the political viability of free trade...

In the presence of multilateral negotiations, are Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) necessary for, or will they prevent, global free trade? I answer this question using a dynamic farsighted model of network formation among asymmetric countries. Ultimately, FTAs prevent global free trade when there...

Data on campaign contributions of PACs (political action committees) in the US does not contain the PACs' issues of concern. Additionally, while recent US lobbying data details the issues of concern for an interest group, it does not detail the Congressional representatives lobbied by the...

This paper provides the first empirical analysis directly comparing the effects of customs unions (CUs) and free trade agreements (FTAs) on members' bilateral trade, while addressing the biases arising from log-linearization of the gravity model and crucial time-invariant unobservables. Since...