Trade policy and quality leadership in transition economies are analyzed in a duopoly model of trade and vertical product differentiation. We first show that the incidence of trade liberalization is sensitive to whether firms in transition economies are producers of low or high quality. Second,...

The phased elimination of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement has been one of the most compelling trade policy reforms of the early twenty-first century, and has brought in significant changes in the industrial structures of the countries of the global south. The textile and clothing industry is the...

This paper studies how WTO rules and flexibilities shape its members' trade policy responses to import shocks. Guided by a cost benefit analysis model and using a unique database of tariff bindings for all WTO countries over the 1996-2011 period, we show that WTO commitments affect members'...

Modern regional trade agreements focus on promoting bilateral exchange mostly by lowering non-tariff barriers to trade. But do existing regional trade agreements actually deliver what they promise? This paper argues that existing results in the literature are upward biased because of measurement...

We investigate the extent to which the effect of the 2018/2019 US import tariff hikes on US (post-tariff) import prices was offset by the concurrent appreciation of the US dollar and trace the source of the appreciation back to US trade policy itself. The dollar response to trade policy...

The practice of trade cost measurement faces several challenges related to data quality, methodology and theory; but the major issue is that of data scarcity. Due to these facts both domestic and asymmetric trade costs have been ignored despite being a feature of modern trade models. This paper...

This paper examines the determinants of “echoing” in antidumping (AD) cases (i.e., different countries sequentially imposing AD measures on the same product from the same exporter). We develop a dynamic game in which two competing importers can choose to impose an AD duty on a third...

This paper studies the effects of trade policy uncertainty on the extensive and the intensive margins of trade for a sample of 149 exporters at the HS6 digit level. We measure trade policy uncertainty as the gap between binding tariff commitments under trade agreements (multilateral and regional...

We investigate to what extent the probability that a Specific Trade Concern (STC) is raised in the WTO against a Member in a given sector is affected by past reductions in applied tariffs. Employing an identification strategy based on “new measures”, we find evidence of a substitution of...

We estimate the trade effect of removing uncertainty about future trading conditions in the context of the 2014 reform of the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) of the European Union (EU). EU GSP members receive non-reciprocal trade preferences (NRTPs), but only as long as they are not too...