World trade contracted dramatically during the global economic crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Disruptions in international supply chains were widely reported as governments imposed containment measures (lockdowns) to halt the spread of the disease. At the same time, demand declined as...

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 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,...

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...

Over the past six years, the Sino-US trade war has not only reshaped the relationship between the world's two largest economies but also profoundly influenced the global economic and trade patterns. This paper reviews the background, process, and implications of the Sino-US trade war, examining...

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...

The Republican Party has been the party most supportive of free trade in American politics for half a century. Donald Trump, the 45th US president, held a different stance from his party on free trade. We assess how Trump's China tariffs in mid-2018 impacted the performance of his party in its...