This paper estimates the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1-2010:Q4 for five industrialized economies - the United States, European Union, Australia, Canada and South Korea. We find evidence of a strong countercyclical trade policy response in the...

This paper estimates the impact of aggregate fluctuations on the time-varying trade policies of thirteen major emerging economies over 1989-2010; by 2010, these WTO member countries collectively accounted for 21 percent of world merchandise imports and 22 percent of world GDP. We examine...

The Bagwell and Staiger (1990) theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts new tariffs (i) increase with imports, (ii) increase with the inverse of the sum of the import demand and export supply elasticities, and (iii) decrease with the variance of imports. We find US import policy during...

China's deepening engagement in the global trading system and the threat of its export capacity have affected the negotiation, formation, and rules of international trade agreements. Among other changes, China's 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) introduced new allowances for...

This is the first paper to empirically examine whether a country's use of an import restricting trade policy distorts a foreign country's exports to third markets. We first develop a theoretical model of worldwide trade in which the imposition of antidumping and safeguard tariffs, or trade...