Research on the quantitative impact of interwar protection on trade flows remains scarce, and much of it has concluded that the impact was surprisingly small. In this paper we ask: Did Indian interwar protection hurt UK manufacturers, by raising tariffs on manufactured imports? Or did it favour...

We introduce a new method for conditioning out serially correlated unobserved shocks to the production technology by building ideas first developed in Olley and Pakes (1996). Olley and Pakes show how to use investment to control for correlation between input levels and the unobserved...

This paper examines Bertil Ohlin's analysis of trade policy and factor rewards in the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. A leading question of the day was whether labor could benefit from protection. Ohlin suspected that labor could benefit from protection...

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...

This paper reconsiders the question of whether tax competition for mobile capital leads to tax rates on capital that are too low or too high from the combined viewpoint of the competing regions (or countries in an economic union). In contrast to standard models of tax competition, both commodity...

This paper studies two episodes where an exporting industry saw its sales plummet after importing countries banned their products to protect their citizens' health. The first case is the poisoned grapes crisis involving Chile and the United States in 1989. The second is the mad cows dispute...

In industries with imperfect consumer information, the lack of a reputation puts latecomers at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis established firms. We consider whether the existence of such informational barriers to entry provides a valid reason for temporarily protecting infant producers of...

In oligopolistic situations content protection can have unexpected effects as it changes the nature of interactions between input suppliers. With a duoply, it does so in a manner that makes the foreign firm wish to match price increases and decreases of the domestic firm. Domestic input...