When governments impose a quota or tariff on imports, it is well known that the resulting rents and revenues trigger costly rent-seeking and revenue-seeking activities, which are welfare-reducing and may be economically more significant than the efficiency losses resulting from the...

Even if free trade creates net welfare gains for a country as a whole, the associated distributional implications can undermine the political viability of free trade. We show that trade-related redistribution -- as presently constituted -- modestly increases the political viability of free trade...

We show that global trade negotiations can prevent global free trade. In a simple model where global tariff negotiations precede sequential Free Trade Agreement (FTA), we show FTA formation can expand all the way to global free trade in the absence of global tariff negotiations but global free...

This paper endogenizes the choice between any type of trade agreement -- Customs Union (CU), Free Trade Agreement (FTA) or Most Favored Nation (MFN) agreement-- and shows how the presence of Preferential Trade Agreements (i.e. CU or FTA) affects the possibility of free trade. The dynamic nature...

I present a three player dynamic network theoretic model where players are farsighted and asymmetric. Unlike the previous literature that imposes an exogenous protocol governing the order of negotiations, I allow the identity of the players who form a link in a given period to depend...

The vast majority of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) formed are actually Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) rather than Customs Unions (CUs). This largely undocumented prevalence of FTAs relative to CUs is surprising given the traditional view of the literature is that PTA members should prefer...

A striking phenomenon emerges from casual observation of the geographical characteristics of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs): while Customs Unions (CUs) are only intra-regional, Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are both inter and intra-regional. A second striking phenomenon is that FTAs...

Conventional wisdom says that tariffs are counter-cyclical. This paper analyzes the relationship between business cycles and applied tariffs using a disaggregated product-level panel dataset covering 72 countries between 2000 and 2011. Strikingly, and counter to conventional wisdom, we find that...

Governments, especially in developing countries, routinely practice binding overhang (i.e. setting applied tariffs below their binding WTO commitments) and frequently move the applied tariff for a given product up and down over the business cycle. Indeed, counter to conventional wisdom, applied...