How do foreign interests influence the policy determination process? What are the welfare implications of such foreign influence? In this paper we develop a model of foreign influence and apply it to the study of optimal tariffs. We develop a two-country voting model of electoral competition,...

This paper shows how unilateral liberalization in one country can increase the voting support for reciprocal reduction in trade barriers in a partner country. When trade policies are determined simultaneously in the two countries, we show the possibility of multiple political equilibria -...

Using the menu-auction approach to endogenous determination of tariffs and allowing additionally for lobby formation itself to be endogenous, this paper analyzes the impact of unilateral trade liberalization by one country on its partner's trade policies. We find that such unilateral...

Why would the US threaten punitive tariffs on luxury autos to implement a market share target in auto parts? We show that by making threats to a linked market, a market share may be implemented with fairly weak informa- tional and administrative requirements. Moreover, such policies can be both...

This paper finds a link between the sharp drop in U.S. manufacturing employment beginning in 2001 and a change in U.S. trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries where the threat of tariff hikes declines the most experience more severe employment...

This paper uses a new dataset on the universe of Canadian imports and tariffs between 1924 and 1936, disaggregated into 1697 goods originating in 112 countries, to analyze the impact on Canadian imports of interwar Canadian trade policy, including the 1932 Ottawa trade agreements. Rather than...

We formalize the GATT/WTO principle of reciprocity in workhorse quantitative trade models, characterizing reciprocal tariff cuts that hold terms of trade fixed and investigating their labor-market impacts. We provide closed-form expressions mapping reciprocal tariff cuts to labor market...

During the decade since 1973, the U.S. economy has become increasingly interdependent with the newly industrializing countries (NICs) among the developing countries. These countries have had high investment ratios to GNP, financed mainly by domestic saving, but also partly by foreign borrowing....