Metadata record for Data and Code for: "Why Special Economic Zones? Using Trade Policy to Discriminate Across Importers"
115282
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
ICPSR metadata records are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
V1
Data and Code for: "Why Special Economic Zones? Using Trade Policy to Discriminate Across Importers"
115282
http://doi.org/10.3886/E115282V1
Matthew Grant
Please see full citation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.
Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Grant, Matthew. Data and Code for: “Why Special Economic Zones? Using Trade Policy to Discriminate Across Importers.” Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2020. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-04-24. https://doi.org/10.3886/E115282V1
F10 Trade: General
F13 Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
F14 Empirical Studies of Trade
Tariffs are generally assumed to depend on the product, not the identity of the importer. However, special economic zones are a common, economically important policy used worldwide to lower tariffs on selected goods for selected manufacturers. I show this is motivated by policymakers' desire to discriminate across buyers when a tax is intended to raise prices for sellers, through a mechanism distinct from existing theories of optimal taxation. Using a new dataset compiled from public records and exogenous changes in imports of intermediate goods, I find the form, composition, and size of U.S. zones are consistent with the theory.