In this paper, I start out with a standard political economy of trade policy model to guide the subsequent estimation of the determinants of trade policy in a developing country. I carefully test the model with Colombian data from 1983 to 1998 accounting for endogeneity and omitted variable bias...

In the growth literature that investigates the effect of trade liberalization on productivity, nearly all studies assume that trade policy is determined independently of productivity, hence it is exogenous. I show, both theoretically and empirically, that this assumption is not valid in general....