Are retaliatiory tariffs politically targeted and, if so, are they effective? Do countries designing a retaliation response face a trade-off between maximizing political targeting and mitigating domestic economic harm? We use the recent trade escalation between the US, China, the European Union...

A common narrative is that COVID-19 cost Trump re-election. We do not find supporting evidence; if anything, the pandemic helped Trump. However, we find substantial evidence that voters abandoned Trump in counties with large increases in health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act,...

A standard finding in the political economy of trade policy literature is that we should expect export-oriented industries to attract more assistance than import-competing industries. In reality, however, trade policy is heavily biased toward supporting import industries. This paper shows within...

Since the recovery from the great financial crisis in 2010, global real trade flows grew much slower than pre-crisis, in both absolute terms (growth rates) and relative terms (relative to GDP, from 2:1 in the great 1990’s to 1:1 since 2012) A debate has arisen as to whether this global trade...

With ever-increasing political tensions between China and Russia on one side and the EU and the US on the other, it only seems a matter of time until protectionist policies cause a decoupling of global value chains. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium trade model calibrated with the...

Global imports subject to pre-shipment inspections (PSI) – a practice under which imports need to undergo a third party review process before shipment – shrank from 700 bn USD in 2010 to 87 bn in 2018. However, only little is known about the trade impact of such procedures, which on the one...

This paper examines the impact of coalitions on the economic costs of the 2012 Iran and 2014 Russia sanctions. By estimating and simulating a quantitative general equilibrium trade model under different coalition setups, we (i) dissect welfare losses for sanctions senders and target; (ii)...

Since July 2013, the EU and the US have been negotiating a preferential trade agreement (PTA), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We use a multi-country, multi-industry Ricardian trade model with national and international input-output linkages to quantify its potential...

The proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States of America would be the largest preferential trade agreement in the world. Encompassing almost half of world GDP, it will have strong economic effects on Germany. In this paper, we...

The European Union and Japan have recently launched negotiations about a bilateral free trade agreement as means of economic stimulation, with trade as a driving force to create growth and wealth. Since customs duties are already low, the success of the liberalization process hinges on the...