We explore the role of government in the nexus of finance and trade starting from the earliest days of organised finance in England and then broadening the analysis to 84 countries from 1960 to 2004. For 18th century England, we find that the government expenditures and international trade did...

We estimate the uncertainty effects of preferential trade disagreements. Increases in the probability of Britain's exit from the European Union (Brexit) reduce bilateral export values and trade participation. These effects are increasing in trade policy risk across products and asymmetric for UK...

For two decades, the consensus explanation of the British Industrial Revolution has placed technological change and the supply side at center stage, affording little or no role for demand or overseas trade. Recently, alternative explanations have placed an emphasis on the importance of trade...

We estimate the impact of increased policy uncertainty from Brexit on UK trade in services. We apply an uncertainty-augmented gravity equation to UK services trade with the European Union at the industry level from 2016Q1 to 2018Q4. By exploiting the variation in the probability of Brexit from...

Global environmental concerns have increased the sensitivity of governments and other parties to the actions of those outside their national jurisdiction. Parties have tried to extend influence extraterritorially both by promising to reward desired behavior and by threatening to punish undesired...

We test empirically for evidence that government tariff-setting behavior depends on the degree of discretion with which policy-makers are endowed. We do this by studying government tariff choices under two distinct environments. One environment is that of tariffs set under the Escape Clause...

This paper is an assessment of three tilts in U.S. trade policy during the 1980s: minilateralism, managed trade, and Congressional activism. It describes their economic and political causes, and whether or not alternative policy directions might have been possible. Taking as given the...

This paper develops a new theory of international economics by introducing Heckscher-Ohlin features of intra-temporal trade into an intertemporal trade approach of current account. To do so, we consider a dynamic general equilibrium model with tradable sectors of different factor intensities,...

How large are optimal tariffs? What tariffs would prevail in a worldwide trade war? How costly would be a breakdown of international trade policy cooperation? And what is the scope for future multilateral trade negotiations? I address these and other questions using a unified framework which...

In democracies, trade policy is the result of interactions among many agents with different agendas. In accordance with this observation, we construct a dynamic model of legislative trade policy-making in the realm of distributive politics. An economy consists of different sectors, each of which...