Economic analysis suggests that a trade war with China can neither stop the decline in American manufacturing employment nor eliminate the U.S. trade deficit, but it could significantly reduce the welfare of American consumers by making U.S. imports of Chinese goods more expensive. Moreover, it...

We incorporate trade imbalances into a quantitative model of bilateral trade in manufactures, dividing the world into forty countries. Fitting the model to 2004 data on GDP and bilateral trade we calculate how relative wages, real wages, and welfare would differ in a counterfactual world with...