Open Skies: Estimating Travelers' Benefits from Free Trade in Airline Services

By Clifford Winston and Jia Yan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2015

The United States has negotiated bilateral open skies agreements to deregulate airline competition on US international routes, but little is known about their effects on travelers' welfare and the gains from the US negotiating agreements with more countri...

Trade Liberalization and Gender Inequality

By Chinhui Juhn, Gergely Ujhelyi, and Carolina Villegas-Sanchez

American Economic Review, May 2013

We consider a model where firms differ in their productivity and workers are differentiated by skill and gender. A reduction in tariffs induces more productive firms to modernize their technology and enter the export market. New technologies involve compu...

Breaking down barriers

[Research Highlight]

July 16, 2018

What are the spillover effects from free trade agreements?

Turning to cartels

[Research Highlight]

June 03, 2019

When factories leave town, does violence get worse?

Tariffs and tearing up trade agreements

[Research Highlight]

October 10, 2019

What would ending NAFTA and Brexit do to car industries around the world?

Numbing the China shock

[Research Highlight]

March 06, 2020

Is there a link between free trade and deaths of despair?

From Final Goods to Inputs: The Protectionist Effect of Rules of Origin

By Paola Conconi, Manuel García-Santana, Laura Puccio, and Roberto Venturini

American Economic Review, August 2018

Recent decades have witnessed a surge of trade in intermediate goods and a proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs). FTAs use rules of origin (RoO) to distinguish goods originating from member countries from those originating from third countries. We...

Do Free Trade Agreements Affect Tariffs of Nonmember Countries? A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

By Kamal Saggi, Andrey Stoyanov, and Halis Murat Yildiz

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

We investigate the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on tariffs of non-member countries. In our multi-country model, the formation of an FTA leads members to reduce their exports to the rest of the world. Such external trade diversion weakens the ab...

What Do Trade Agreements Really Do?

[Symposium: Does the US Really Gain From Trade?]

By Dani Rodrik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

Economists have a tendency to associate "free trade agreements" all too closely with "free trade." They may be unaware of some of the new (and often problematic) beyond-the-border features of current trade agreements. As trade agreements have evolved ...

Importing polarization

[Research Highlight]

October 26, 2020

Professor Gordon Hanson discusses how competition from China has pushed some communities to the edges of the political spectrum.

Political Distortions, State Capture, and Economic Development in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Nathan Canen and Leonard Wantchekon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

This article studies the role of political distortions in driving economic growth and development in Africa. We first discuss how existing theories based on long-run structural factors (e.g., pre-colonial and colonial institutions, or ethnic diversity) ma...

The Trade Reform Wave of 1985−1995

By Douglas A. Irwin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The decade from 1985 to 1995 will go down in history as an unprecedented period in which global trade barriers were reduced. Some trade agreements (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Single Market, the Uruguay Round) were prominent late...

Distributional Impacts of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement

By Brian K. Kovak and Peter M. Morrow

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We examine the effects of the 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) on employment and earnings inequality among low-, medium-, and high-income Canadian workers initially employed in manufacturing. Although the FTA tariff cuts drove large changes in tr...

Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA

By Jiwon Choi, Ilyana Kuziemko, Ebonya Washington, and Gavin Wright

American Economic Review, June 2024

Why have white, less-educated voters left the Democratic Party? We highlight the role of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In event-study analysis, we demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to...

The political consequences of NAFTA

[Research Highlight]

June 27, 2024

Jiwon Choi and Gavin Wright discuss the economic and political fallout of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Free Trade and the Formation of Environmental Policy: Evidence from US Legislative Votes

By Jevan Cherniwchan and Nouri Najjar

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

We test the hypothesis that governments alter environmental policy in response to trade by studying NAFTA's effects on the formation of environmental policy in the US House of Representatives between 1990 and 2000. We find that reductions in US tariffs de...

Palen, Marc-William. Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World

By Saumitra Jha

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2025