This paper studies empirically the relationship between trade policy and individual income risk faced by workers. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, longitudinal data on workers are used to estimate time-varying individual income risk parameters in various manufacturing sectors. The estimated income risk parameters and data on trade barriers are then used to analyze the relationship b...

The present difficulties of democratic welfare states in Europe are often ascribed to economic "globalization", that is to the world-wide integration of markets for capital, goods and services which has eliminated national control over boundary-crossing economic transactions, and which therefore exposes national producers to world-wide competition. In fact, however, globalization in the strict ...

This paper presents a monopolistic competition model of trade and multinational production that incorporates asymmetric trade barriers and international differences in production costs. The model predicts the functional form for the dependence of U.S. exports and multinational production on tariffs, distance, and production costs. To deal with simultaneity, we estimate the nonlinear equations o...

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby improving its bargaining position. On the other hand, a tariff can prompt inefficient organizational c...

This paper examines the effect of the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The results suggest that U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico have been responsive to tariff rate reductions applied to Mexican products. A one percentage point decrease in tariff rates is associated with an increase in U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico by 5.31% in the f...

A strategy to convert quotas to tariffs is to auction the quota rights and use the realized auction prices as guides to setting tariffs. In the 1980s, New Zealand employed auctions to allocate quota licenses. We analyze the relationship between tariff-equivalents and auction prices for auctions with resale. Using panel data from New Zealand’s quota license auctions, we estimate the expected val...

This paper follows up on its companion paper decomposing the effects of the transition from a fully average cost distribution tariff to a cost reflective distribution tariff, in terms of time and location, that uses nodal prices to recover losses and an “extent-of-use” method to recover network fixed costs based on use at coincident peak, but in the presence of distributed generation (DG). As w...