International Trade, Political Economy
The Informational Value of Lobbying in the Tariff Exclusion Process
This paper quantifies the informational channel of lobbying in the U.S. Section 301 tariff exclusion process and assesses its net welfare consequences. I develop and quantify a structural model of informational lobbying centered on a microfounded, noisy signaling game. The estimated model allows me to run a counterfactual analysis comparing the observed equilibrium to one where lobbying is banned, providing a quantitative measure of the net value of informational lobbying in this setting.
Lobbying Competition on EXIM Bank Decisions in the United States
This paper investigates how lobbying by competing domestic interests influences the financing decisions of the U.S. Export-Import (EXIM) Bank. The issue creates a conflict driven by production linkages: U.S. upstream exporters lobby for financing, while domestic downstream firms lobby against it. I construct a novel application-level dataset and develop a structural model of informational lobbying in which competing firms signal their productivity to a welfare-maximizing agency to influence its decision.