Free trade or preferential trade areas (PTAs) allow importers who belong to the area to export to each other while paying zero or preferential tariffs as long as Rules of Origin (ROOs) are met. Meeting them is costly not only in terms of production costs but also in terms of documentation costs....

I explore whether the world trading system of the twentieth century can be adapted to address the challenges of the twenty-first. I first develop an understanding of how GATT functioned during the twentieth century, and which features of the economic environment were most important in...

We examine how export expansion induced by the U.S-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) affected migration, school enrollment, work and healthcare use of young children and adolescents in Vietnam. To do so, we exploit variation in tariff reductions across industries associated with the BTA...

Trade policy uncertainty (TPU) has become an important source of economic uncertainty and research. We review the main sources and measures of TPU. We then provide a conceptual framework for modeling TPU and methods of estimating and quantifying its effects. We analyze its role in trade...

The design of a trade agreement should reflect its purpose. Does digital trade change the purpose of a trade agreement? To explore this question, I first describe the definitional and classification issues associated with digital trade, and for modeling purposes I adopt a simple taxonomy of the...

We study whether tariff preferences conferred on South Korean goods through the implementation of the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) drew U.S. import demand away from other U.S. trading partners through the phenomenon known as trade diversion. In the two years following the...

We study the effects on trade from the annual tariff uncertainty about China's MFN status renewal prior to joining the WTO. We have three main findings. First, counter to the evidence elsewhere, trade increases strongly in anticipation of uncertain future increases in tariffs. Second, even...

What incentives do governments have to negotiate "new trade agreements," i.e., agreements that constrain not only governments' choices of tariffs, but also their domestic regulatory policies? We focus on horizontal product standards, i.e., those that impose requirements along a horizontal...

In December 2019, the United States and China reached a Phase One trade agreement, under which China committed to purchase more imports from the United States: $12.5 billion more agricultural imports in 2020 and $19.5 billion more in 2021, as compared to 2017. We show that the most efficient way...

We examine how deep agreements on domestic regulations affect welfare in a world where such agreements are influenced by producer lobbies. The answer to this question depends in a critical way on whether the agreement focuses on product standards or on production regulations. International...