The theoretical debate over whether countries can and should set tariffs in response to the foreign export elasticities they face goes back to Edgeworth (1894). Despite the centrality of the optimal tariff argument in trade policy, there exists no evidence about whether countries actually...

In many preferential trade agreements (PTAs), countries exchange not only reductions in trade barriers but also cooperation in non-trade issues such as labour and environmental standards, intellectual property, etc. We provide a model of PTAs motivated by cooperation in non-trade issues and...

When two policies are available to achieve the same goal why is the relatively inefficient one often observed? We address this question in the context of policies used to redistribute income towards special interest groups (SIGs) where in the first stage the constraints on policy instruments are...