Event Details

This Seminar is hosted by the Economics Department

Paola Conconi will present a Seminar on

Title “Trade Protection along Supply Chains”

http://conconi.ulb.be/BCET.pdf

Abstract During the last few decades, the United States has applied increasingly high tariffs on imports from China in the form of antidumping duties and other temporary trade barriers (TTBs). We combine detailed information on US TTBs since the 1980s with US input-output data to study the effects of trade protection along supply chains. To deal with endogeneity concerns, we instrument tariffs exploiting variation in the political importance of different industries – resulting from changes in the identity of swing states across electoral terms – and in their experience at petitioning for TTBs. We find that tariffs in upstream industries have large negative effects on downstream industries, raising input prices and decreasing employment, sales, and investment. Our baseline estimates for the 1988-2016 period indicate that a one standard deviation increase in US input tariffs against China decreases employment growth by 0.3 percentage points per year. These estimate simply that around 570,000 jobs were lost due to input protection during the last seven presidential terms. We show that around 204,000 additional jobs were lost due to TTBs against China since President Trump took office.