Government Procurement in US Trade Agreements

Have US-Japan Trade Agreements Made a Difference?

The few existing empirical studies of U.S.-Japan trade agreements have relied primarily on descriptive statistics or univariate time series methods. We conduct a more powerful test by evaluating agreements in the context of well-specified econometric models. Consistent with trade theory, import demand is modeled as a cointegrating relationship with income and relative price variables, where a t...

Evaluating Discretion in Government Procurement

Government procurement contracts generally garner a small number of bids, and it is not uncommon for only one bid to be considered. This paper quantifies multiple factors determining the extent of competition observed in the United States federal procurement data for commercially unavailable IT and telecommunications service contracts. We develop, identify, and estimate a principal-agent model ...

On Subsidies in Trade Agreements∗

The role of production subsidies in trade agreements has long been neglected by trade economists. To fill this gap, Bagwell and Staiger (2006) analyze this issue and show that, quite generally, the sole variable efficient trade agreements need to address is market access and that, moreover, the de facto prohibition of subsidies by prevailing WTO legislation is inefficient. The present paper sho...

Reciprocity in Free Trade Agreements

We use detailed trade, tariff, and income data for countries involved in 91 trade agreements negotiated since 1980 to test for reciprocity in free trade agreements. The results offer strong evidence of reciprocity in North-North and South-South free trade agreements, but there is little empirical support for reciprocity in North-South trade agreements. In particular, after controlling for other...

Preferential Trade Agreements