This paper uses three years of individual-level data to analyze the determinants of individual preferences over trade and immigration policies in the United States. Different economic models make contrasting predictions about what forces should shape these preferences. We have four main empirical results. First, we find that factor type dominates industry of employment in explaining support for...

Although it is widely acknowledged that an understanding of mass attitudes about trade is crucial to the political economy of foreign commerce, only a handful of studies have addressed this topic. These studies have focused largely on testing two models, both of which emphasize that trade preferences are shaped by how trade affects an individual's income. The factor endowments or Heckscher-Ohli...

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of public opinion towards free trade, investigating cleavages both between and within countries. We study the distributional effects of trade policy in a neoclassical economy with not just two, but many input factors in production. We demonstrate that the factor price changes induced by trade policy are negatively correlated with the fact...

The Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) theorem predicts whether a country will be a net exporter of services of a certain factor and the volume of the factor content of trade given the country's and the world's factor endowment information. Recent empirical work has documented that the measured factor content of trade is too small compared to the theoretical prediction and named this special pattern o...

Economists overwhelmingly support free international trade. According to a 2006 Economists’ Voice survey, for example, 87% of economists polled agreed that “the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade.” Yet a vocal community of activists opposes globalization due to concerns that trade exploits workers and the environment in the developing world. In response to these...

We study the impact of country size on wages in a two-country trade model with monopolistic competition and non-homothetic preferences. Since there is renewed interest in nonhomothetic preferences and variable markups, we revisit standard results on wages obtained using homothetic (CES) preferences. The standard results are that, under free trade, wages are equal and that, with iceberg costs, t...

When choosing a mate, women are thought to face a trade-off between genetic and parental quality. Recent research suggests that this trade-off is influenced by environmental factors such as pathogen prevalence and resource scarcity, which affect the relative value of genetic and parental quality to offspring fitness. To further investigate these findings, the current study primed 60 women with ...