This Paper assesses the foreign lobbying forces behind the tariff preferences that the United States grants to Latin American countries. The basic framework is one developed by Grossman and Helpman (1994) that is extended to explain the relationship between foreign lobbying and tariff...

This Paper provides a new approach to the evaluation of pre-shipment inspection (PSI) programs as ways of improving tariff-revenue collection and reducing fraud when customs administrations are corrupt. We build a model highlighting the contribution of surveillance firms to the generation of...

This paper examines the trade policy response of Latin American governments to the rapid growth of China and India in world markets. To explain higher protection in sectors where a large share is imported from these countries, we extend the ‘protection for sale’ model to allow for different...

Using an extension of the influence-driven lobbying approach developed by Grossman and Helpman, we study the impact of regional trading arrangements (RIAS) on trade policy towards non-members in a three-good, three-country model.

Bhagwati and Brecher (1980) showed that when the relative amount of foreign-owned factors in the host country is sufficiently large as to induce a change in the direction of the trade pattern, immiserising tariff reductions may occur. Here it is shown that in the mirror case when foreign-owned...

This paper addresses an issue that has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both from international trade economists and from labor economists: What has caused the relative wage of skilled labor compared to unskilled labor in the United States to increase through the 1980s and 1990s?