How should economists interpret current trade wars and the recent U.S. trade actions that have initiated them? In this paper we offer an interpretation of current U.S. trade actions that is at once more charitable and less forgiving than that typically offered by economic commentators. More...

Most manufacturing activities use inputs from the financial and business services sectors. But these services sectors also compete for resources with manufacturing activities, provoking concerns about deindustrialization attributable to financial services in developed countries like the United...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to flexibly infer border barriers are often missing for services, we derive a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical...