Wednesday, October 14, 2020 | 9:00am - 10:30am | ZOOM

Abstract

One justification for trade protectionism is the benefits of terms-of-trade manipulation. Another reason, more central in trade policy negotiations, is the idea that trade protectionism brings industries back home. The new economic geography theory has provided intuitive insights on how the location effect of trade policy shapes welfare in the protecting country. Previous work, however, has been able to say much less about the quantitative effects of trade policy on the location of firms across space and over time, and its welfare implications. We develop a multi-country dynamic general-equilibrium trade and spatial model with forward-looking decisions of firms on where to locate production, forward-looking decisions of workers on where to supply labor, and endogenous capital structure accumulation. We take the model to the data using trade and production data for many locations and industries, as well as using data on firms’ demographics from several data sources. We use the model to study how trade protectionism impacts the location of production across space and over time, as well as its welfare consequences. We find quantitative evidence that protection relocates production to the protected country but that this comes at the cost of higher prices and lower welfare.