A common narrative is that COVID-19 cost Trump re-election. We do not find supporting evidence; if anything, the pandemic helped Trump. However, we find substantial evidence that voters abandoned Trump in counties with large increases in health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act,...

The trade war initiated by the Trump administration is the largest since the US imposed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs in the 1930s and was still raging when he left office. We analyze how the trade war impacted the 2020 US Presidential election. Our results highlight the political salience of the...

Are retaliatiory tariffs politically targeted and, if so, are they effective? Do countries designing a retaliation response face a trade-off between maximizing political targeting and mitigating domestic economic harm? We use the recent trade escalation between the US, China, the European Union...

We find that Republican candidates lost support in the 2018 congressional election in counties more exposed to trade retaliation, but saw no commensurate electoral gains from US tariff protection. The electoral losses were driven by retaliatory tariffs on agricultural products, and were only...

This study explores the influence of trade policy uncertainty on medical innovation investment in developing nations from 1980 to 2020, with a focus on the period of COVID-19. We used exogenous and heterogeneous exposure to trade-policy-uncertainty resolutions from developing countries' trade...

This paper begins with a discussion of what constitutes corporate welfare, then proceeds to apply the corporate welfare concept to the steel industry in the United States. A review is made of the various government supports that the steel industry has enjoyed since 1969. Studies have estimated...

This paper examines upstream propagations of the U.S.-China tariff war in 2018-2019 through the lens of exports from 32 countries to China. Building an industry-country specific measure of input-output linkages with China, we obtain new empirical evidence that the U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports...

This paper studies the impacts of the 2018 U.S. tariff surges on export prices and adjustments of sales across different markets of Chinese exporters. The complete tariff passthrough result is robust to controlling for firm-related fixed effects. While firms’ exports to the U.S. dropped...

This paper highlights the importance of multilateral cooperation as an avenue for tackling technical barriers to trade (TBTs). These non-tariff barriers are some of the most prevalent affecting global trade. While the US-China trade war and its tariff escalation was grabbing headlines,...