Why is Trade Not Free? A Revealed Preference Approach

Rodrigo Adao, Arnaud Costinot, Dave Donaldson and John Sturm Becko

No 18567, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: D60 D7 D70 F0 F10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-11
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Working Paper: Why is Trade Not Free? A Revealed Preference Approach (2024)
Working Paper: Why is Trade Not Free? A Revealed Preference Approach (2023)
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