This paper examines how the prospect of foreign retaliation affects the antidumping (AD) process in the United States. We separate the capacity for retaliation into two channels: (i) the capacity for foreign government retaliation under the dispute settlement procedures of the GATT/WTO system,...

Over the WTO years, the frequency of disputes and court rulings has trended downwards. Such trends are sometimes interpreted as symptoms of a dispute resolution system in decline. In this paper we propose a theory that can explain these trends as a result of judicial learning; thus according to...

We provide a simple but novel model of trade agreements that highlights the role of transaction costs, renegotiation and dispute settlement. The model allows us to characterize the appropriate remedy for breach and whether the agreement should be structured as a system of "property rights" or...

Formal economic analysis of trade agreements typically treats disputes as synonymous with concerns about enforcement. But in reality, most WTO disputes involve disagreements of interpretation concerning the agreement, or instances where the agreement is simply silent. And some have suggested...

East Asian countries have become much more active in utilizing the WTO dispute settlement system to assert their legal rights. The dispute settlement experience so far for these countries has shown strong tendency of domestic governments to defend economic interest of major industries. Their...

A prominent problem with the WTO dispute settlement procedures is the practical difficulty faced by small and developing countries in finding the capacity to effectively retaliate against trading partners that are in violation of their WTO commitments. In light of this problem, Mexico has...

The 2008 financial crisis did not precipitate global retaliatory trade intervention, in seeming contrast to the Great Depression in 1930s. This paper discusses the influence of model structure in optimal tariff (OT) calculations in explaining this puzzle. We emphasize how earlier literature...