Information is costly to acquire in trade and financial markets, especially across international borders. Sellers and buyers rely on information and experiences of other firms, including from business partners located in other countries. This Paper identifies three channels through which...

Competition between opposing lobbies is an important factor in the endogenous determination of trade policy. This paper investigates empirically the consequences of lobbying competition between upstream and downstream producers for trade policy. The theoretical structure underlying the empirical...

Policy making power enables governments to redistribute income to powerful interests in society. However, some governments exhibit greater concern for aggregate welfare than others. This government behavior may itself be endogenously determined by a number of economic, political and...

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the extend to which trade agreements affect agricultural trade policy volatility. Using a new panel database compiled as part of the World Bank's Agricultural Distortions research project, we estimate the effect of regionalism (proxied in various ways)...

Although average tariffs in Quad markets are very low, tariff peaks and tariff escalation have a disproportional effect on exports from least developed countries (LDCs). Tariff peak products tend to be heavily concentrated in agriculture and food products and in labour-intensive sectors such as...

Exporters’ performance in a particular market may affect their future exports to the rest of the world. Importers may base their future transaction decisions upon the information revealed by exporters’ past performance in other countries. Similarly, exporters acquire valuable information on...

This paper extends the influence-driven model of trade policy determination to include general equilibrium effects on the supply side resulting from labour-market interaction and intermediate goods. The model’s predictions for the structure of protection are related to underlying taste and...

Using an extension of the influence-driven lobbying approach developed by Grossman and Helpman, we study the impact of regional integration arrangements (RIAs) on trade policy towards non-members in a three-good, three-country model. We explore under what conditions the formation of an RIA...

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