While standard demand factors perform well in predicting historical trade patterns, they fail conspicuously in 2020, when pandemic-specific factors played a key role above and beyond demand. Prediction errors from a multilateral import demand model in 2020 vary systematically with the health...

This thesis consists of five independent chapters, studying how economic agents respond to unanticipated shocks. Chapter 1 shows that a well-intentioned policy can create unintended barrier to voting by creating seemingly small shocks to voting costs. Election administrators in Munich control...

This paper provides evidence on the unintended effects of US and Chinese trade policies on the 2020 US presidential election. In response to a series of US tariffs imposed on Chinese goods, China imposed retaliatory tariffs, especially on US agricultural products, which largely affected...

This paper examines upstream propagations of the U.S.-China tariff war in 2018-2019 through the lens of exports from 32 countries to China. Building an industry-country specific measure of input-output linkages with China, we obtain new empirical evidence that the U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports...

This paper studies the impacts of the 2018 U.S. tariff surges on export prices and adjustments of sales across different markets of Chinese exporters. The complete tariff passthrough result is robust to controlling for firm-related fixed effects. While firms’ exports to the U.S. dropped...

This paper highlights the importance of multilateral cooperation as an avenue for tackling technical barriers to trade (TBTs). These non-tariff barriers are some of the most prevalent affecting global trade. While the US-China trade war and its tariff escalation was grabbing headlines,...

This paper analyzes the effects of the current trade conflict on developing Asia using the Asian Development Bank's Multiregional Input - Output Table (MRIOT), allowing us to calculate the impact on individual countries and on sectors within countries. The analysis estimates the direct impact on...

We use the dynamics of U.S. imports across goods in the period around the U.S.-China trade war with a model of exporter dynamics to estimate the dynamic path of the probability of transiting between Normal Trade Relations and a trade war state. We find (i) there was no increase in the likelihood...

We review theoretical and empirical work on the economic effects of the United States and China trade relations during the last decades. We first discuss the origins of the China shock, its measurement, and present methods used to study its economic effects on different outcomes. We then focus...