The proliferation of preferential trade liberalization over the past 20 years has raised the question of whether it slows down multilateral trade liberalization. Recent theoretical and empirical evidence indicates this is the case even for unilateral preferences that industrial countries provide...

An important question that has continued to elude trade economists is why trade interventions are biased in favor of import-competing rather than exportable sectors. Indeed, as Philip Levy (1999) points out, under a set of neutrality assumptions, the dominant political-economy model, Grossman...

We study the implications of loss aversion for trade policy determination and show how it allows us to explain a number of important and puzzling features of trade policy. An important question concerning trade policy is why a disproportionate share of protection goes to declining industries. We...

Economic reforms along with its promise of increasing income and growth rates have also raised concerns about its distributional implications. These concerns are at the heart of the arguments of those who oppose certain economic reforms. Focusing on the economic reforms implemented in India, we...

In this dissertation I assess the impact of developing country trade liberalization on their wage inequality by focusing on two possible channels, namely job formality and inter-industry wage premium. Informal workers are a large share of the workforce, more than 30% in Brazil and Colombia, and...

Policy commitment and credibility are important for inducing agents to make costly, irreversible investments. Policy uncertainty can delay investment and reduce the response to policy change. I provide theoretical and novel quantitative evidence for these effects by focusing on trade policy, a...

This dissertation studies the use of the US antidumping (AD) legislation. In the first chapter, I use panel data on AD petitions filed by US industries from 1980 to1995 to study the determinants of antidumping filings. I argue that a negative binomial model is better suited to study the...

This thesis examines the effect of integration on wages when the economy is partially unionized. The first part sets up a general equilibrium model where wages in one sector are set by a monopoly union. The unionized sector of the economy also utilizes a factor (capital) which is internationally...

December 1999 - The median landlocked country has only 30 percent of the trade volume of the median coastal economy. Halving transport costs increases that trade volume by a factor of five. Improving the standard of infrastructure from that of the bottom quarter of countries to that of the...

What effect does distance have on costs for economies at different locations? Exports and imports of final and intermediate goods bear transport costs that increase with distance. Production and trade depend on factor endowments and factor intensities as well as on distance and the transport...