On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon closed the gold window and imposed a 10 percent surcharge on all dutiable imports in an effort to force other countries to revalue their currencies against the dollar. The import surcharge was lifted four months later after the Smithsonian agreement...

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically assess, from a welfare perspective, the desirability of uniform import tariffs. Since the eruption of the debt crisis, many proposals for structural reforms in the developing countries have contemplated a trade liberalization process that would...

This paper describes the updating of the NBER trade dataset, which now provides U.S. import and export values to the year 2001, disaggregated by Harmonized System (HS), Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), and the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) categories. In...

We show in a multi-sector, heterogeneous-firm trade model that the effect of tariffs on entry, especially in the presence of production linkages, can reverse the traditional positive optimal tariff argument. We then use a new tariff dataset, and apply it to a 189-country, 15-sector version of...

This paper studies how international trade influences U.S. presidential elections. We expect the positive employment effects of expanding exports to increase support for the incumbent's party, and job insecurity from import competition to diminish such support. Our national-level models show for...

Instrumental variables (IV) are a common means to identify treatment effects. But standard IV methods do not allow us to unpack the complex treatment effects that arise when a treatment and its outcome together cause a second outcome of interest. For example, IV methods have been used to show...

A large and growing share of international trade is carried on airplanes. Air cargo is many times more expensive than maritime transport but arrives in destination markets much faster. We model firms' choice between exporting goods using fast but expensive air cargo and slow but cheap ocean...

We study unanticipated tariffs on imports of intermediate goods in a setting with firm-to-firm supply relationships. Firms that produce differentiated products conduct costly searches for potential input suppliers and negotiate bilateral prices with those that pass a reservation level of match...

We analyze the policy trade-offs generated by local currency price stability of imports in economies where upstream producers strategically interact with downstream firms selling the final goods to consumers. We study the effects of staggered price setting at the downstream level on the optimal...

We analyze the dynamic macroeconomic effects of border adjustment taxes, both when they are a feature of corporate tax reform (C-BAT) and for the case of value added taxes (VAT). Our analysis arrives at the following main conclusions. First, C-BAT is unlikely to be neutral at the macroeconomic...