This study investigates the effect of protectionist tariffs on firm performance, income tax payments, and shareholder payouts and investment. Using the US–China trade war and related Section 301 tariffs as a setting, I find that US firms impacted by these tariffs experience decreased firm performance while simultaneously increasing cash tax planning to presumably decrease their total cash burden to the government. I also find that impacted firms decrease shareholder payouts and acquisitions, but do not decrease other real investment activities that may negatively impact operating performance. Cross-sectional analyses confirm that these effects apply to domestic firms, do not appear to be driven by the retaliatory Chinese tariffs, and are more pronounced for those facing higher market competition or applying for exclusions from the protectionist tariffs.

Since the fifteenth century the rise of capitalism and the expansion of global trade networks have ensured that a wide range of consumer goods has become available to people from all walks of life. Paralleling these developments, our attitudes and beliefs about consumer goods have also changed: goods that were once considered luxuries have become commonplace in domestic households. This study celebrates the diversity of this material culture and the variety of symbolic meanings people attach to it. The US – China trade, as a facet of the Spice Trade, is inextricably linked to the development of capitalism and long-distance shipping that ensured the movement of consumer goods to markets around the world. Inevitably, many of these ships sank and archaeologically their cargoes and the artifacts associated with their crew provide an opportunity to glimpse the development of our modern world. This thesis uses the shipwreck Frolic (1850) as a case study to discuss how those involved in, and those who were supplied through, this trade used a range of consumer goods to construct distinct identities for themselves and those around them. This study also draws on a wide variety of source material, including material culture (museum collections and archaeological assemblages), images and documentary sources (courtesy literature and newspapers) to paint a broader picture of the US – China trade and consumer society than any one source is capable of doing itself. This study ultimately argues that the range in consumer goods associated with the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US – China trade is symptomatic of the increasing complexity of consumer markets able to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of a wide array of consumer identities, necessary under the many new social, economic and ideological relationships constructed under capitalism.

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first two are regarding the political economy of international trade, the third is about empirical banking.Chapter 1 is titled "Suspiciously Timed Trade Disputes" and it is the result a joint work with Paola Conconi, David DeRemer, Georg Kirchsteiger, and Maurzio Zanardi. This Chapter is already published in the Volume 105 of the Journal of International Economics and it shows that electoral incentives crucially affect the initiation of trade disputes. Focusing on WTO disputes filed by the United States during the 1995-2014 period, we find that U.S. presidents are more likely to initiate a dispute in the year preceding their re-election. Moreover, U.S. trade disputes are more likely to involve industries that are important in swing states. To explain these regularities, we develop a theoretical model in which re-election motives can lead an incumbent politician to file trade disputes to appeal to voters motivated by reciprocity. The second chapter, titled "Trade Policy and the China Syndrome", analyzes how trade policy can be used to smooth the effects of trade liberalizations. The recent backlash against free trade is partially motivated by the decline in manufacturing employment due to rising import competition from China. Politicians in high-income countries have extensively used antidumping (AD) measures and other temporary trade barriers to protect their economies from rising Chinese imports. To estimate the causal effect of trade protection on industry outcomes, I construct a new instrument for AD measures based on the importance of an industry in swing states and the industry's experience at filing AD petitions. In this paper, I first show that trade policy contained the rise of Chinese imports in protected sectors, decreasing the annual growth rate of US imports from China in a range between 3% and 14% compared to the non-protected sectors. Second, I show that these protectionist measures have contained the "China Syndrome". In manufacturing sectors protected by AD measures, the annual growth rate of employment was between 2% and 24% higher compared to non-protected sectors. I find that previous studies that neglect the moderating impact of AD have underestimated the negative effects of Chinese import competition on US manufacturing employment by between 5% and 15%.The third chapter, titled "Bank Lending Standards and Credit to Firms during the Great Recession", is a joint work with Lorenzo Ricci and Giovanni Soggia. This chapter investigates the impact of unforeseen shifts in lending standards on firm credit in Italy on the onset of the Great Recession, using data from the Regional Bank Lending Survey to disentangle the effects of loan supply and demand.We combine our measure of change in bank supply with bank-firm loans retrieved from the credit register. Our proposed empirical strategy presents several benefits: it allows us to (i) estimate the impact of credit supply in the absence of an exogenous shock to banks, (ii) analyze credit policy throughout the sample period, and (iii) disentangle the effect of geographical heterogeneity within Italy using the rich information from our survey data. The effect of supply shocks differs across types of loans. A firm with a revocable credit line from a bank that tightens its lending standards suffers a reduction in credit growth more than if it had borrowed from a bank with unchanged lending standard. On the extensive margin, a supply shock decreases the acceptance probability of a new loan with a pronounced effect for term loans. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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