Industrial subsidies take on a growing importance in trade discussions. Yet assessing the scope and scale of government interventions in manufacturing remains notoriously difficult due to a persistent lack of reliable and comparable data. With many governments failing to provide sufficient...

Governments in the EU grant Rescue and Restructure Subsidies to bail out ailing firms. In an international asymmetric Cournot duopoly we study effects of such subsidies on market structure and welfare. We adopt a common market setting, where consumers from the two countries form one market. We...

Free zones have become increasingly popular as trade promotion policy instruments in developing countries. This article explains how the obligations in the WTO Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures apply to free zones. An analysis of the most common requirements for companies...

South Korea felt "betrayed" when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed his administration's flagship climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022, into law. This paper first shows how the Biden administration addressed Korea's concerns about the law's effect on its sales of...

Faced with the energy transition imperative, governments have to decide about public policy to promote renewable electrical energy production and to protect domestic power generation equipment industries. For example, the Canada - Renewable energy dispute is over Feed-in tariff (FIT) programs in...

This paper investigates the effect of awarding a second investment grant to the same firm. We implement a Regression Discontinuity Design strategy using a very rich firm-level administrative database, which allows us to link applications to grants and their scores to firms' performance. Overall,...

A national-champions-related industrial policy has become (again) en vogue among European politicians. Against this background, our work orders different types of national champions along the industry lifecycle. Different types of locally bound externalities appear along the lifecycle. In a...

Making use of an original dataset we empirically investigate the determinants of state aid to the car industry in the European Union. The EU regulatory system on state aids and the long history of governments' grants to this industry make this an interesting case study. Our findings show that in...