Were high import tariffs somehow related to the strong U.S. economic growth during the late nineteenth century? This paper examines this frequently mentioned but controversial question and investigates the channels by which tariffs could have promoted growth during this period. The paper shows...

This paper uses a new dataset on the universe of Canadian imports and tariffs between 1924 and 1936, disaggregated into 1697 goods originating in 112 countries, to analyze the impact on Canadian imports of interwar Canadian trade policy, including the 1932 Ottawa trade agreements. Rather than...

An unresolved question concerning post-Civil War U.S. industrialization is the degree to which import tariffs protected domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. This paper considers the impact of import tariffs on the domestic pig iron industry, the basic building block of the entire...

How much has the US-China tariff war impacted economic outcomes in China? We address this question using high-frequency night lights data, together with measures of the trade exposure of fine grid locations constructed from Chinese firms' geo-coordinates. Exploiting within-grid variation over...

This paper examines the political economy of U.S. trade policy around the time of the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, a period when policy was unconstrained by trade agreements. We consider a model of politically-optimal trade policy for a large country that can influence its terms of trade and...

Economic histories of the interwar years view the Great Depression and the Smoot Hawley Tariff as inextricably bound up with one another. They assign a central role to the Depression in explaining the passage of the 1930 Tariff Act and at the same time emphasize the role of the tariff in the...

We investigate the effects of higher tariffs on the current account.Tariffs may increase or decrease investment depending on the capital intensity of the sector protected. We find that ther esponse of saving to tariffs issensitive to the modelling of saving behavior. In a model in which...

This paper derives the dependency of optimal tariff and inflation tax on tax collection and enforcement costs. The analysis is done for a small, open economy. The existence of such costs can justify tariff and inflation tax policies as optimal revenue-raising devices. This paper suggests that...

Using actual trade and tariff data for the United States and the European Community, this paper demonstrates how a trade negotiation such as the Tokyo Round, can be modelled as a game among countries attempting to minimize individual welfare loss functions. Once welfare functions are...