This paper uses 68 measures of trade policy and trade liberalization to ask if membership in theWorld Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is associated with more liberal trade policy. Almost no measures of trade policy are significantly...

We describe recent work on the theory of trade agreements that speaks to the purpose and design of GATT. Our discussion proceeds in three steps. First, we examine the purpose of a trade agreement. In both the traditional economic and the political-economy approaches to the study of trade...

This paper empirically examines recently declassified data from the GATT/WTO on tariff bargaining. We document eight stylized facts about these interconnected high-stakes international negotiations. We use detailed product-level offer and counteroffer data to examine several questions about...

Detailed country-by-country chronologies are an informative companion piece to our paper “Exchange Arrangements Entering the 21st Century: Which Anchor Will Hold?,” which provides a comprehensive history of anchor or reference currencies, exchange rate arrangements, and a new measure of...

The collapse of the gold standard in the 1930s sparked a debate about the merits of fixed versus floating exchange rates. Yet the debate quickly vanished: there was almost no discussion about the exchange rate regime at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 because John Maynard Keynes and Harry...