Quantifying the welfare effects of trade liberalization is a core issue in international trade. Existing frameworks assume perfect labor markets and therefore ignore the effects of aggregate employment changes for welfare. We develop a quantitative trade framework which explicitly models labor...

If a free trade agreement (FTA) is characterized by the exchange of market access with a large and competitive trading partner, the agreement can cause a leakage of protectionist benefits to domestic industry from lobbying against external tariff cuts. This rent destruction effect of an FTA can...

Recent quantitative trade models treat import tariffs as pure cost shifters so that their effects are similar to iceberg trade costs. We introduce revenue-generating import tariffs, which act as demand shifters, into the framework of Arkolakis, Costinot and Rodriguez-Clare (2012), and generalize...

This study evaluates the role market competition plays in determining inflation based on sector-level data from OECD countries. In theory, trade openness can affect inflation through changes in market competitiveness and productivity. Nonetheless, previous empirical studies often fail to account...

We investigate how tariff liberalization has affected exporting in emerging countries. We use a highly disaggregated bilateral measure of market access to compare tariffs applied in 1996 and 2006, which includes the timing of the Uruguay Round and episodes of bilateral liberalization. Our...

Do elderly workers retire early voluntarily, or are they induced (or even forced) by their employees? To establish the relevance of the labor demand component in retirement decisions, we consider a trade liberalization between Switzerland and the EU – the Mutual Recognition Agreement (MRA). A...

In this paper, we apply a convex hull approach to counterfactual analysis of trade openness and growth. The experiments we choose evaluate the importance of trade openness for growth across African countries. Specifically, we ask the question “what would happen if African countries were more...

This paper introduces the concept of a steepest ascent tariff reform for a small open economy. By construction, it is locally optimal in that it yields the highest gain in utility of any feasible tariff reform vector of the same length. Accordingly, it provides a convenient benchmark for the...