This paper is a contribution to the literature on rational design of trade agreements. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an incomplete contract among sovereign states. Incomplete contracts contain gaps. Ex post, contractual gaps may leave gains from trade unrealized; they may create...

This paper constitutes an attempt to reframe and eventually deflate the ongoing “compliance-vs.-rebalancing” debate which has permeated WTO scholarship for the last 10 years. Our main criticism concerns the substance of the entire debate. We find that scholars on both sides of the...

A global trade, economy-wide framework is used to assess the implications of improvements in market access through quota expansion and lowering of in- and out-of-quota tariffs. Special features include recent estimates of applied tariffs and TRQs and explicit treatment of those policies in the...

This paper discusses GTAP-L, an extension of the GTAP model that allows for the analysis of U.S. simulated unemployment effects in trade scenarios. The market clearing condition in the standard GTAP model which equates vacancies to separations was replaced with a matching function. In a matching...