What kinds of changes in foreign competition lead domestic industries to seek import protection? To address this question, we use detailed monthly US import data to investigate changes in import composition during a 24-month window immediately preceding the filing of a petition for import...

This paper develops an efficiency theory of contingent trade policies. We model the competition for a domestic market between one domestic and one foreign firm as a pricing game under incomplete information about production costs. The cost distributions are asymmetric because the foreign firm...

What incentives do governments have to negotiate "new trade agreements," i.e., agreements that constrain not only governments' choices of tariffs, but also their domestic regulatory policies? We focus on horizontal product standards, i.e., those that impose requirements along a horizontal...

This paper develops an efficiency theory of contingent trade policies. We model the competition for a domestic market between one domestic and one foreign firm as a pricing game under incomplete information about production costs. The cost distributions are asymmetric because the foreign firm...

The paper uses Grossman and Helpman's "protection for sale" model (1994) to analyze the process of trade liberalization that has occurred in Australia. First, this paper verifies that the predictions of the "protection for sale" model are consistent with the data. Then, it analyzes the...

One of the most contentious issues arising from the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations was the attempt to harmonize patent policy. However, previous theoretical models have failed to provide a clear rationale for the coordination of patent policy, indeed they imply that world welfare may...