Trade Policy and Antitrust: Do Consumers Matter to Legislators?

Robert Feinberg, Thomas Husted () and Kara Reynolds

No 2008-14, Working Papers from American University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We provide one of the first efforts to measure the importance of consumer preferences in legislators’ trade policy decisions by estimating the degree to which the level of antitrust enforcement in the legislator’s state impacts his or her vote on free trade agreements. To the extent that antitrust and trade liberalization are both viewed as proconsumer in nature, we would expect to see a positive relationship between antitrust enforcement in their legislative district and Congressional votes in support of trade liberalization. We find evidence suggesting that consumer preferences do play a role in legislative decisions on trade policy.

Keywords: Free Trade Agreements; Competition Policy; Antitrust; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 L4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind and nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.17606/zj2h-nc15 First version, 2008 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Trade Policy and Antitrust: Do Consumers Matter to Legislators? (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:amu:wpaper:1408

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from American University, Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Meal ().