Trade policy-making in a model of legislative bargaining

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Celik, Levent; Karabay, Bilgehan; McLaren, John
• 署名单位: Charles University Prague; Czech Academy of Sciences; Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Czech Academy of Sciences; Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences; University of Auckland; University of Virginia
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2013.09.001
• 发表日期: 2013
• 页码: 179-190
• 关键词: Trade policy; Multilateral legislative bargaining; political economy; distributive politics

摘要

In democracies, trade policy is the result of interactions among many agents with different agendas. In accordance with this observation, we construct a dynamic model of legislative trade policy-making in the realm of distributive politics. An economy consists of different sectors, each of which is concentrated in one or more electoral districts. Each district is represented by a legislator in the Congress. Legislative process is modeled as a multilateral sequential bargaining game a la Baron and Ferejohn (1989). Some surprising results emerge: bargaining can be welfare-worsening for all participants; legislators may vote for bills that make their constituents worse off; identical industries will receive very different levels of tariff. The results pose a challenge to empirical work, since equilibrium trade policy is a function not only of economic fundamentals but also of political variables at the time of congressional negotiations some of them random realizations of mixed bargaining strategies. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.