International trade agreements are an important element of the world economic system, but questions remain as to their purpose. The terms-of-trade hypothesis posits that countries use tariffs in part to improve their terms of trade and that trade agreements cause them to internalize the costs...

The Most-Favored Nation (MFN) clause has long been suspected of creating a free rider problem in multilateral trade negotiations. To address this issue, we model multilateral negotiations as a mechanism design problem with voluntary participation. We show that an optimal mechanism induces only...

This paper develops a model of the trade liberalization process, featuring both international negotiation and special-interest-driven domestic politics. We show that a country may wish to adopt a policy of unilaterally reducing its tariff whenever political opposition in other countries stalls...

The 2006 WTO Trade Policy Review of the United States reveals that national security concerns have become a dominant influence on US trade policy since 2001. This paper argues that direct and indirect effects of this influence have been deleterious to the multilateral trading system. Security...

The authors examine international trade in a commodity whose production creates a negative externality for the importing country and they consider the nations' strategic policy choices when they can restrict trade and when they are bound by a free-trade agreement. When pollution-abatement...