The trade war initiated by the Trump administration is the largest since the US imposed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the 1930s and was still raging when he left office. We analyze how the trade war impacted the 2020 US Presidential election. Our results highlight the political salience of the...

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,...

This paper shows that Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) makes multinational firms more aggressive by increasing cost-reducing investments with the aim to enlarge the potential compensation an ISDS provision may offer. While a larger investment reduces the market distortion, it will also...

Do the U.S. have a current account surplus or a deficit with the EU? Since 2009, official sources disagree: The U.S. Department of Commerce claims a consistent U.S. surplus while Eurostat reports the opposite. International transactions are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, but the...

Trade sanctions are a common instrument of diplomatic retaliation. To guide current and future policy, we ask: What is the most cost-efficient way to impose trade sanctions against Russia? We build a quantitative model of international trade with input-output connections. Sanctioning countries...

Did the 2018/19 US-China trade war trigger adjustment of Global Value Chains (GVCs) and nearshoring to Mexico? We address this question with confidential longitudinal firm-level trade data from Mexico that covers the universe of international trade transactions over 2015-2021. By merging the...

NGO campaigns against firms with value chains involving production in developing and emerging economies are a salient feature of economic globalization. What determines the patterns of the internationalization of NGO campaigns? Stylized facts obtained from recently available data containing 102...

Traditional international trade models explain comparative advantage and describe aggregate gains for a country from trade and from terms-of-trade improvement but do not address the politics of international trade policy. A positive or predictive model that studies the politics of trade policy...

We demonstrate that durable MFN tariff elimination affects trade patterns through several layers, and magnitudes of effects are sizable. The WTO Information Technology Agreement's (ITA) unique setting allows us to overcome the challenges associated with identifying effects of non-discriminatory...