We study the determinants of trade policy decisions focusing specifically on antidumping and countervailing duty statutes administered by the International Trade Commission (ITC). Using detailed industry, import, and political pressure data we model ITC decision making, weighing the relative...

We examine the incentives for a government to levy an optimal tariff on a foreign monopolist. With complete information, the size of the tariff is proportional to the firm's efficiency. By contrast, if the government is not completely informed about costs, there exists an incentive for the...

This paper documents two key costs of AD protection. First, once AD has been adopted countries often have a difficult time restraining its use. In recent years "new" users have accounted for half of the overall world total. Many of the heaviest AD users are countries who did not even have an AD...

In this paper I present evidence on the effectiveness of AD actions. Using a data set based on the line-item tariff codes identified in the cases, I examine the trade patterns of both countries named in the petition and those countries not subject to the investigation. Several important finding...

We examine the importance of delegation for Congressional policy-making, focusing particularly on U.S. trade policy. We present a model of decision-making where legislators use trade policy to maximize their districts' welfare. We show that this simple model does a remarkable job explaining...

Competition policy emerged as an important area of interest during the later stages of Uruguay Round negotiations. The task of establishing competition policy is complicated by the fact that there already are trade statutes---antidumping, countervailing duty, safeguard actions---that relate to...

We examine the incentives for a government to levy an optimal tariff on a foreign monopolist. With complete information, the home government uses tariffs to extract rents and therefore implements a policy of discriminatory tariffs entailing higher tariffs on more efficient firms. By contrast if...

In 1984 Congress amended the antidumping and countervailing duty laws, mandating that the ITC ``cumulate'' imports across countries when determining injury. We estimate that cumulation increases the probability of an affirmative injury determination by 20 to 30 percent and has changed the ITC's...

We argue that the rise of antidumping protection and the proliferation of voluntary export restraints are fundamentally inter-related. We show that both can be explained by a cost-based definition of dumping when the domestic government has incomplete information about the foreign firm's costs....

In this paper we examine how the timing of investment affects the levels of quality chosen by firms. We show that in a model with vertical quality differentiation a game with sequential quality choice induces both firms to make smaller quality investments than they would in a game with...