Improving Trade Theory: Innovations in Measurement and Empirical Strategy

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Autor, Dorn, and Hansen (2013) spawned a renewed interested among IPE scholars in novel ways of empirical identification. While an IV can be useful, its strict assumptions are often easy to be violated, and thus, identification remains difficult to achieve. A growing scholarship within IPE seeks to improve upon ways to identify the effects of changing dynamics of international trade on the policy preferences of firms and voters. Against this backdrop, this panel presents four papers that span diverse empirical approaches.
Bisbee applies generalized diff-in-diff methods to re-investigate some of the most prominent findings across the economics and political science literature and determines which causally-identified results hold. Gulotty develops a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to examine the effect that subsidization of products in Europe has on the use of sanitary and phytosanitary barriers to trade in destination markets. By tracing the origins of value added in intermediate trade across multiple regions, He, Pang, Chaudoin, and Milner develop novel structural, dyadic, and node-level measures of global value chains to map power relations in the dynamic of globalization. Park examines ways to measure protectionist bias using historical congressional speech data in an effort to reevaluate the role of economic uncertainty in inducing trade policy cycles over time.

Sub Unit

• Division 16: International Political Economy

Individual Presentations

• Reassessing the China Shock: How Import Competition Paved the Way for Populism - James Hodgdon Bisbee, NYU

• Safe Harbors: Using Health & Safety Regulations against Undisciplined Subsidies - Robert Gulotty, The University of Chicago

• Structure, Interdependence, and Evolution of Globalization Featured by GVCs - QingQian He, Tsinghua University; Xun Pang, Tsinghua University; Helen V. Milner, Princeton University; Stephen Chaudoin, Harvard University

• Rational Tariff Cycles: Economic Uncertainty and Trade Policy in the Long Run - In Young Park, Princeton University

Chair

• Jeffry A. Frieden Harvard University

Discussants

• Michael J. Hiscox Harvard University

• Dustin Halliday Tingley Harvard University