The dominant academic literature about trade agreements maintains that they are only about national terms-of-trade manipulation and not at all about purely political concerns. Non-academic economists, commentators, and diplomats by contrast think that trade agreements are all about political...

This paper interprets dispute settlement procedures and punishments as responses to the fact that trade agreements are incomplete contracts. I argue that this can explain prominent features and has implications for trade agreements. If no weight is given to the adjudication phase and if the...

During the past half century, multilateral trade liberalization has reduced tariffs to historically low levels. The Received Theory of multilateral trade agreements, based solely on terms-of-trade externalities between national governments, offers an explanation that has become the conventional...