Ward M. Reesman
Working Papers
"Temporary Trade Barriers and Export Growth" with Cheng Chen [Job Market Paper]
Temporary trade barriers (TTBs) like antidumping (AD) have been shown to have large and persistent effects on trade flows between countries, but there is mixed evidence on the direction of the effect on trade to unrelated markets in part driven by unique institutional features that complicate identification. In this paper, we revisit classical TTB questions with a focus on AD policy through the lens of export growth using publicly available product-level trade data. We find qualitatively different trade effects when accounting for growth effects that suggest AD investigations are associated with global reductions in within-product trade, across all destinations. We provide evidence that these reductions are not primarily driven by policy-related chilling effects, and argue a supply-side investment/innovation channel is a larger contributor. Our findings suggest the aggregate impact of AD policy on the global trade flows of exporters is potentially large due to complementarity across export markets and long run effects. Working Paper Supplemental Appendix
"Determinants of Economic Integration Agreement Formation" with Scott Baier
Economic integration agreements (EIAs) are widespread multilateral agreements between countries that have a variety of characteristics based on the level of integration, ranging from preferential trade agreements to economic unions. However, little is understood about the economic motives for the formation of various EIAs. In this paper, we leverage a long panel of bilateral trade, gravity, migration, and EIA data to investigate potential determinants of EIA formation. We first estimate gravity models of migration flows to disentangle the relationship between agreement formation and bilateral migration. We then build a simple spatial model of trade incorporating migration inspired by the results of the gravity estimation, and use features of the model to inform the structure of a random forest. The estimation results of the random forest suggest different economic characteristics of countries and country-pairs are important factors in the formation of different types of EIAs.