In popular discussion much has been made recently of the susceptibility of government policies to lobbying by foreigners. The general presumption has also been that such interactions have a deleterious effect on the home economy. However, it can be argued that, in a trade policy context, bending...

Although policy uncertainty has drawn regulators' attention in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, little is known on how to alleviate its adverse effects. In this paper, we examine the role of political connections in mitigating the detrimental impact of policy uncertainty on banks....

Whether bilateral trade barrier data conform with the Grossman-Helpman (1995) model's predictions about 'trade talks' is examined in this article. A simple form of the prediction from the model is tested. Bilateral US-Japan and US-EU data from the 1990s are employed. The results are the first in...

This paper presents theory and empirical evidence showing a retaliatory pattern in US-Canadian tariff interactions in the period 1868-1970, whereby the changes in the tariff level of each country are Granger-caused by the other. In the long run, the USA maintains the tariff changes that it...

The authors study whether political campaign contributions influence agricultural protection in the United States in the manner suggested by the political economy model of Grossman and Helpman (1994). This is the first attempt to test this model using agricultural data. The authors test the...

There exist legal channels for informational lobbying of U.S. policymakers by foreign principals. Foreign governments and private sector principals frequently and intensively use this institutional channel to lobby on trade and tourism issues. This paper empirically studies whether such lobbying...

The author surveys the empirical literature on the political economy of agricultural protection. He uses a detailed data set of agricultural Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions over five U.S. congressional election cycles over the 1991-2000 period to investigate the relationship...