TY  - JOUR
AU  - Goldbe,Pinelopi Koujianou
AU  - Maggi,Giovanni
TI  - Protection for Sale: An Empirical Investigation
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5942
PY  - 1997
Y2  - February 1997
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5942
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5942.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pinelopi K. Goldberg
Yale University
Department  of Economics
37 Hillhouse Ave.
P.O. Box 208264
New Haven, CT 06520-8264
E-Mail: penny.goldberg@yale.edu

Giovanni Maggi
Department of Economics
Yale University
37 Hillhouse Avenue Rm 27
New Haven, CT 06511
Tel: 203/432-3569
Fax: 203/432-6323
E-Mail: giovanni.maggi@yale.edu
AB  - A prominent model in the recent political-economy literature on trade policy is Grossman and Helpman's (1994)  Protection for Sale' model.  This model yields clear predictions for the cross-sectional structure of trade protection.  The objective of our" paper is to check whether the predictions of the Grossman-Helpman model are consistent with the data and, if the model finds support, to estimate its two key structural parameters: the government's valuation of welfare relative to contributions, and the fraction of the voting population represented by a lobby.  We find that the pattern of protection in the U.S. in 1983 is consistent with the basic predictions of the model.  Our estimate of the government's valuation of welfare relative to contributions is surprisingly high; the weight of welfare in the government's objective function is estimated to be between 50 and 88 times the weight of contributions.
ER  -