Competition between opposing lobbies is an important factor in the endogenous determination of trade policy. This paper investigates empirically the consequences of lobbying competition between upstream and downstream producers for trade policy. The theoretical structure underlying the empirical...

Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and...

This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. We use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last five decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the...

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...

That domestic political economic factors are important determinants of a nation's trade barriers has been empirically well established. However, the question of how effective strategically retaliatory trade barriers are in deterring foreign protectionism has received far less systematic...

The extreme bounds analysis in Leamer (1982) is extended to the Tobit model with censoring. The extension involves the simple modification of replacing the censored values of the dependent variable by their expectation conditional on the MLEs and using the negative of the Hessian evaluated at...

In popular discussion, much has been made of the susceptibility of government policies to lobbying by foreigners-the general presumption being that this is harmful to the home economy. However, in a trade policy context this may not be the case. If the policy outcome absent any foreign lobbying...

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. The authors empirically study whether such lobbying...

In this paper we examine some testable implications of growth theories based on threshold externalities and complementarities. Specifically, we use industry data for a set of eight emerging economies in East Asia and Eastern Europe to perform general tests of the big push industrialization...