• Media type: E-Book
  • Title: Why is Trade Not Free? : A Revealed Preference Approach
  • Contributor: Adão, Rodrigo [Author]; Costinot, Arnaud [Author]; Donaldson, Dave [Author]; Sturm, John A. [Author]
  • Corporation: National Bureau of Economic Research
  • Published: Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2023
  • Published in: NBER working paper series ; no. w31798
  • Extent: 1 Online-Ressource; illustrations (black and white)
  • Language: English
  • Keywords: Außenhandel ; Außenwirtschaftspolitik ; Importbeschränkung ; Politiker ; Wohlfahrtsanalyse ; Offenbarte Präferenzen ; USA ; General ; Analysis of Collective Decision-Making ; Arbeitspapier ; Graue Literatur
  • Reproduction note: Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
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  • Description: A prominent explanation for why trade is not free is politicians' desire to protect some of their constituents at the expense of others. In this paper we develop a methodology that can be used to reveal the welfare weights that a nation's import tariffs implicitly place on different groups of society. Applied in the context of the United States in 2017, this method implies that redistributive trade protection accounts for a significant fraction of US tariff variation and causes large monetary transfers between US individuals, mostly driven by differences in welfare weights across sectors of employment. Perhaps surprisingly, differences in welfare weights across US states play a much smaller role