a. Rationale for protection. The protection of confidential business information dates at least to Roman law, which afforded relief against a person who induced another's employee to divulge secrets relating to the master's commercial affairs. The modern law of trade secrets evolved in England in the early 19th century, apparently in response to the growing accumulation of technical know-how an...

In the economic model that underlies the WTO the only group that can be expected to ask for protection is producers in importing countries. The existing multilateral trade architecture reflects that assumption. Much of the recent criticism of the multilateral trade regime has arisen as a result of new groups explicitly asking domestic politicians for protection. As these groups were not expecte...

Existing research suggests that democracy fosters economic globalization by promoting trade liberalization in the developing world. We argue that democracy in developing countries generates a “skill bias” in trade protection where democratic incumbents have incentives to increase tariffs on high skilled goods but reduce trade barriers on low skilled goods. Our model analyzes how electoral compe...

The United States has been pushing for foreign patent protection through free trade agreements and the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). A gravity model using panel data from 1993 to 2007 suggests that foreign patent protection has not significantly increased the United States’ trade of pharmaceuticals. Other factors are stron...

Using state and industry-level unemployment and trade protection data from India, we find no evidence of any unemployment increasing effect of trade reforms. In fact, our state-level analysis reveals that urban unemployment declines with liberalization in states with flexible labor markets and larger employment shares in net exporter industries. Moreover, our industry-level analysis indicates t...

The objective of this paper is to quantify Lobbying Effectiveness for trade policy. I introduce this measure into Grossman and Helpman’s (1994, American Economic Review 84: 833–850) model of protection-for-sale (PFS). Two alternate factors are suggested to explain differences in lobbying effectiveness across sectors; first, predisposition of the government to supply protection (owing arguably t...

BACKGROUND To generate knowledge about potential improvements to human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination information and organization strategies, we assessed how aspects of HPV vaccination are associated with parents' preferences for their daughters' uptake, and which trade-offs parents are willing to make between these aspects. METHODS A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted among pa...

In this paper, we present one of the first direct microeconometric studies of the impact of trade protection on household income in Ghana. Tariff measures at the two-digit ISIC level are matched to Ghanaian household survey data for 1991/92 and 1998/99 to represent the tariff for the industry in which the household head is employed. We examine the possibility that the effect of protection on in...

Would global patent protection be too weak without international coordination? Would it be too strong with the international coordination mandated by the TRIPS agreement (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights)? I try to answer these questions using a model of patent-setting game between governments. I introduce firm-biased government preferences and trade barriers, ...