Protection for Sale: An Empirical Investigation / Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Giovanni Maggi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goldberg, Pinelopi Koujianou.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Maggi, Giovanni.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w5942.

NBER working paper series no. w5942

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1997.

Summary:

A prominent model in the recent political-economy literature on trade policy is Grossman and Helpman's (1994) Protection for Sale' model. This model yields clear predictions for the cross-sectional structure of trade protection. The objective of our" paper is to check whether the predictions of the Grossman-Helpman model are consistent with the data and, if the model finds support, to estimate its two key structural parameters: the government's valuation of welfare relative to contributions, and the fraction of the voting population represented by a lobby. We find that the pattern of protection in the U.S. in 1983 is consistent with the basic predictions of the model. Our estimate of the government's valuation of welfare relative to contributions is surprisingly high; the weight of welfare in the government's objective function is estimated to be between 50 and 88 times the weight of contributions.

Notes:

Print version record

February 1997.