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...

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...

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...

This paper analyzes some aspects of the effects of trade restrictions (such as tariffs, quotas and quality controls) and their desirability when the quantity of the imported good is endogenous, and the foreign producer is a monopolist. It uses a fairly general model based on the work of Spence...

National governments have incentives to intervene in international markets, particularly in encouraging export cartels and in imposing tariffs on imports from imperfectly competitive foreign firms. Although the optimal response to foreign monopoly is usually a tariff, a specific subsidy will be...

Free trade is not optimal for a small country that faces uncertain terms of trade if some factors are immobile - ex post, and markets for contingent claims are incomplete. The government can improve social welfare by using commercial policy that serves as a partial substitute for missing...