Abstract: Policymakers are obsessed with how trade flows create dependencies and vulnerabilities. They’ve spent billions of dollars on subsidies and deployed industrial policy to decrease their foreign dependence and remove chokepoint vulnerabilities that their adversaries could exploit. Where are these vulnerabilities? Have they become more concentrated in chokepoints over time? Will industrial policy to reshore production […]

Abstract: Do targeted sanctions hurt American firms financially? Existing research offers competing arguments but little firm-level evidence on financial fundamentals. We shift the debate from aggregate sender costs to response-conditional performance. Our real options theory shows that partial, evolving sanctions present firms with binary choices depending on their starting position. Prior suppliers stay or exit; […]

Abstract: Issues like trade are often considered too technical and low salience to appear in national debates, raising questions over the increasing supply of trade messages in campaign speeches. We develop a theoretical framework that explains where and when elites supply trade messages. Incumbent-party candidates avoid trade messages, even where doing so would win local support, […]