Did US Politicians Expect the China Shock?
- (pp. 174-209)
Abstract
Information sets, expectations, and preferences of politicians are fundamental, but unobserved determinants of their policy choices. Employing repeated votes in the US House of Representatives on China's normal trade relations (NTR) status during the two decades straddling China's World Trade Organization (WTO) accession, we apply a moment inequality approach designed to deliver consistent estimates under weak informational assumptions on the information sets of members of Congress. This methodology offers a robust way to test hypotheses about what information politicians have at the time of their decision and to estimate the weight that constituents, ideology, and other factors have in policy making and voting.Citation
Bombardini, Matilde, Bingjing Li, and Francesco Trebbi. 2023. "Did US Politicians Expect the China Shock?" American Economic Review, 113 (1): 174-209. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20210140Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- D78 Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
- D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
- D84 Expectations; Speculations
- F14 Empirical Studies of Trade
- P33 Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions: International Trade, Finance, Investment, Relations, and Aid