The Bagwell and Staiger (1990) theory of cooperative trade agreements predicts new tariffs (i) increase with imports, (ii) increase with the inverse of the sum of the import demand and export supply elasticities, and (iii) decrease with the variance of imports. We find US import policy during...

This paper uses highly detailed, quarterly data for five major industrialized economies to estimate the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on import protection policies over 1988:Q1 - 2010:Q4. First, estimates on a pre-Great Recession sample of data provide evidence of two key relationships....

This paper estimates the impact of macroeconomic shocks on the trade policies of thirteen major emerging economies over 1989 - 2010; by 2010, these WTO member countries collectively accounted for 21 percent of world merchandise imports and 22 percent of world GDP. We examine determinants of...