NBER Publications by Wesley Wilson

A primary function of trade policy is to restrict imports to benefit the targeted domestic sector. However, a well-established theoretical literature highlights that the form of trade policy (e.g., quotas versus tariffs) can have a significant impact on how much trade policy affects firms’ abilities to price above marginal cost (i.e., market power). The US steel industry provides an excellent example to study these issues, as it has received many different types of trade protection over the past decades. We model the US steel market and then use a panel of data on major steel products from 1980 through 2006 to examine the effects of various trade policies on the steel market. We find that the US steel market is very competitive throughout our sample with the exception of the period in ...

As the clearinghouses for a major portion of the world's rapidly increasing international trade flows, ocean ports and the efficiency with which they process cargo have become an ever more important topic. Yet, there exist very little data that allows one to compare port efficiency measures of any kind across ports and, especially, over time. This paper provides a new statistical method of uncovering port efficiency measures using U.S. Census data on imports into U.S. ports. Unlike previous measures, this study's methodology can provide such estimates for a much broader sample of countries and years with little cost. Thus, such data can be used by future researchers to examine a myriad of new issues, including the evolution of port efficiencies over time and its effects on international tr...

The U.S. steel industry has long held that foreign subsidization and excess capacity has led to its long-run demise, yet no one has formally examined this hypothesis. In this paper, we incorporate foreign subsidization considerations into a model based on Staiger and Wolak’s (1992) cyclical-dumping framework and illustrate testable implications of both cyclical excess capacity and structural excess capacity stemming from foreign subsidization. We then use detailed product- and foreign country-level data on steel exports to the U.S. market from 1979 through 2002 to estimate these excess capacity effects. The results provide strong evidence of both cyclical and structural excess capacity effects for exports to the U.S. market. However, the effects are confined to such a narrow range of count...