The paper uses a political economy framework to explain the empirical observation that trade protection is persistent. The assumptions that are shown to generate endogenous tariff persistence in the model are quite plausible: agents are uncertain about future prices, tariffs are affected by...

This paper examines political action committees' motivations for giving campaign contributions to candidates for political office. First, the paper estimates the effect of campaign contributions received by candidates on the outcomes of the 1996 elections to the U.S. House of Representatives....

This paper examines representatives' voting on the HEALTH Act of 2003, which proposed a limit on noneconomic damages in medical malpractice lawsuits. The estimates show that the more campaign contributions a representative received from law firm PACs, the less likely he or she was to vote for...

This paper examines the motivation of political action committees in their campaign contributions. The paper estimates the effect of contributions on the 1996 House of Representatives elections and on the candidates' policy stances. Contributions to challengers have a large impact on election...

This paper provides one of the first assessments of the hypothesis that two countries are more likely to form a preferential trade agreement (PTA) if they are already major trading partners. The paper also tests a number of predictions from the political economy literature about which countries...