occupation and the political economy of trade job routineness offshorability and protectionist sentiment the recent backlash against globalization in many advanced economies raises questions about the source of this protectionist sentiment traditional accounts generally attribute the welfare consequences of trade to skill level or industry characteristics or instead emphasize the nonmaterial determinants of support for openness consequently we know little about how a major labor market characteristic occupation shapes both the distributional consequences of and preferences toward trade openness we propose and test a new theory of trade policy preferences based on occupation characteristics drawing from the tasks literature in economics we argue that occupation characteristics are a key determinant of how trade affects workers and thus individuals trade preferences our theory suggests that in advanced economies individuals in routine task intensive occupations will be negatively affected by trade and thus more protectionist this relationship will increase in the degree to which occupation job tasks can be provided from a distance i e offshorable we find support for our theory using data from the 2003 and 2013 international social survey programme in high income democracies our results suggest that the occupational characteristics of routineness and offshorability are important determinants of trade preferences offering additional understanding of the sources of protectionist sentiment even after controlling for labor market characteristics suggested by conventional wisdom

on the determinants of bank interest margins under credit and interest rate risks abstract this paper explores the determinants of optimal bank interest margins based on a simple firm theoretical model under multiple sources of uncertainty and risk aversion the model demonstrates how cost regulation credit risk and interest rate risk conditions jointly determine the optimal bank interest margin decision we find that the bank interest margin is positively related to the bank s market power to the operating costs to the degree of credit risk and to the degree of interest rate risk an increase in the bank s equity capital has a negative effect on the spread when the bank faces little interest rate risk the effect of rising interbank market rate on the spread is ambiguous and depends on the net position of the bank in the interbank market our findings provide alternative explanations for the empirical evidence concerning bank spread behavior

the mass political economy of capital controls this article examines mass public opinion toward international financial market regulations known as capital controls conventional wisdom maintains that most voters do not pay attention to or c

who wants to globalize consumer tastes and labor markets in a theory of trade policy beliefs although the allure of consumption is the engine of globalization political economists have tended to ignore varying consumer tastes as a potential source of beliefs about trade policy this article develops a theory of trade policy preferences that adds the notion of varying consumer tastes to the standard labor market application of the heckscher ohlin trade model the theory which can explain trade preferences both across individuals and countries is supported by an empirical analysis of survey data from 41 nations heavy consumers of exportables are found to be more protectionist than heavy consumers of imports and import competing goods moreover citizens in countries with expensive tradable goods see trade liberalization as a remedy to the rents they pay for protectionism other findings also support the more conventional labor market side of the heckscher ohlin model

provoking preferences unionization trade policy and the ilwu puzzle if any group of american blue collar workers has benefited from the growth of trade it is the unionized dockworkers along the us west coast nevertheless the international longshore and warehouse union ilwu representing these workers is vocally opposed to trade liberalization we examine several competing explanations for this puzzle and evaluate them by tracing the union s stance on trade over several decades we also use an original survey to compare ilwu affiliates attitudes on trade with those of nonmembers with otherwise similar characteristics consistent with a model of organizational socialization the data support the hypothesis that ilwu membership affects the members revealed political opinions the data are difficult to reconcile with standard theories of international trade our findings indicate that the political support for trade depends not just on voters structural positions in the economy but also on the organizations and networks in which they are embedded

iceland on the rocks the mass political economy of sovereign debt resettlement we undertake an individual level analysis of mass political behavior toward sovereign debt resettlement by leveraging the unique circumstances of a 2011 referendum on debt repayment in iceland this allows us to engage broader questions about mass international political economy against the recent thrust of a growing literature we find evidence of material economic pocketbook effects self interest on voting behavior operating alongside symbolic sociotropic and partisan political logics contrary to expectations these self interest effects are not conditional on voter sophistication we conclude that conventional sampling frames may be inappropriate for understanding contemporary democratic contestation over international economic policy

learning to love globalization education and individual attitudes toward international trade recent studies of public attitudes toward trade have converged on one central finding support for trade restrictions is highest among respondents with the lowest levels of education this has been interpreted as strong support for the stolper samuelson theorem the classic economic treatment of the income effects of trade that predicts that trade openness benefits those owning factors of production with which their economy is relatively well endowed those with skills in the advanced economies while hurting others low skilled workers we reexamine the available survey data showing that the impact of education on attitudes toward trade is almost identical among respondents in the active labor force and those who are not even those who are retired we also find that while individuals with college level educations are far more likely to favor trade openness than others other types of education have no significant effects on attitudes and some actually reduce the support for trade even though they clearly contribute to skill acquisition combined these results strongly suggest that the effects of education on individual trade preferences are not primarily a product of distributional concerns linked to job skills we suggest that exposure to economic ideas and information among college educated individuals plays a key role in shaping attitudes toward trade and globalization this is not to say that distributional issues are not important in shaping attitudes toward trade just that they are not clearly manifest in the simple broad association between education levels and support for free trade the authors would like to thank james alt jeffry frieden robert lawrence dani rodrik ron rogowski ken scheve andy baker peter gourevitch and beth simmons for helpful comments on earlier drafts

inequity aversion and the international distribution of trade protection one important puzzle in international political economy is why lower earning and less skilled intensive industries tend to receive relatively high levels of trade protection this pattern of protection holds across countries with vastly different economic and political characteristics and is not well accounted for in existing political economy models we propose and model one possible explanation that individual inequity aversion leads to systematic differences in support for trade protection across industries we conduct original survey experiments in china and the united states and provide strong evidence that individual policy opinions about sector specific trade protection depend on the earnings of workers in the sector we also present structural estimates that advantageous and disadvantageous inequality influence support for trade protection in the two countries o ne important puzzle in international political economy is why lower earning and less skilled intensive industries tend to receive relatively high levels of trade protection because this pattern of protection holds even in low income countries for which lower earning and less skilled intensive industries are likely to be comparative advantage sectors it is arguably at odds with the common empirical finding that declining comparative disadvantage industries are more likely to receive protection moreover it is at odds with most theoretical political economy models which tend to either predict consistent with most empirical work that losing sectors from international trade receive more protection or that expanding sectors that gain from greater trade should enjoy more government support existing accounts are generally good at explaining support for winners or for losers they are not however good at

mexico s experiments with bank privatization and liberalization 1991 2003 during the 1990s mexico conducted two experiments with its banking system in the first experiment 1991 96 it privatized the banks this experiment took place with weak institutions to enforce contract rights it also took place without institutions that encourage prudent behavior by bankers the result was reckless behavior by banks and a collapse of the banking system in the second experiment 1997 2003 mexico reformed many of the institutions that promoted bank monitoring and it opened up the industry to foreign investment it was less successful however in reforming the institutions that promote the enforcement of contract rights the result was that bankers behaved prudently but prudent behavior in the context of weak contract rights implies that banks are reluctant to extend credit to firms and households

related lending and banking development does related lending have positive or negative effects on the development of banking systems we analyze a unique cross country data set covering 74 countries from 1990 to 2007 and find that related lending on average does not have any effect on the growth of credit we do find however that there are conditional relationships related lending tends to retard the growth of banking systems when rule of law is weak whereas it tends to promote the growth of banking systems when rule of law is strong we also find that related lending appears to be associated with looting when banks are owned by non financial firms but that it does not do so when non financial firms are owned by banks our results indicate that whether related lending is positive or pernicious depends critically on the institutional context in which it takes place there is no single best policy regarding related lending these findings are robust to alternative specifications including iv regressions

selection and influence interest groups and congressional voting on trade policy studies of the effects of interest groups on congressional roll call voting typically view party and ideology as competing factors and rely on a factoral model of interests or a sectoral model including only interest groups with a direct stake in the vote we depart from that strategy in several ways we define interest groups at the level of standard industrial classification two digit codes and observe the universe of interests for 1979 90 we use measures of geographically and nongeographically based economic interests to estimate the representative s party and ideology we also consider the factor endowments of individuals within a district to examine their impact on floor votes we then investigate the influence of these interests on members party affiliation and ideology as well as a pool of five floor votes on foreign trade using instrumental variables for party and ideology economic interests account for a substantial portion of the variance in all cases and models that also include other explanatory variables are highly accurate in estimating floor votes

through a glass and darkly attitudes toward international trade and the curious effects of issue framing are most voters opposed to globalization a growing body of empiri cal research using data from available surveys of public opinion suggests that anti globalization sentiments are strong especially among blue collar workers this article reports the findings from a survey experiment aimed at measuring the impact of issue framing on individuals stated attitudes toward international trade respondents given an antitrade introduction to the survey question linking trade to the possibility of job losses were 17 percent less likely to favor increasing trade with other countries than were those asked the same question without any introduction at all curiously respondents who were given a protrade introduction to the question suggesting that trade can lead to lower prices for consumers were not more likely to express sup port for trade than those who received no introduction in addition the responses of less educated individuals were more sensitive to framing effects than those of highly educated individuals without measuring and taking these types of framing effects into account opinion surveys offer unreliable guides to gauging the extent and dis tribution of opposition to trade among voters results from a second experiment reveal that knowledge of the endorsement of trade openness by economists mitigates framing effects and raises overall support for trade liberalization by a substantial degree

promises or policies an experimental analysis of international agreements and audience reactions a key assumption of audience costs theories of crisis bargaining and international cooperation is that audience members have strong preferences for consistency between their leader s commitments and actual policy choices however audiences also have strong preferences over the policy choices themselves regardless of their consistency with past commitments i conducted a randomized survey experiment to evaluate the magnitude of consistency and policy effects in the context of international agreements over trade policy respondents with expressed policy preferences whether supporting or opposing free trade have muted reactions to learning that their leader has broken an agreement only respondents with no opinion on trade policy are affected by learning that their leader s policy is inconsistent with prior commitments this suggests that constituents underlying preferences limit the degree to which audience costs influence policymakers calculations

the impact of liberalization and foreign investment in colombia s financial sector abstract this study analyzes financial liberalization measures undertaken in 1990 of which an opening to foreign investment was a major component after a brief description of the major changes in legislation on foreign investment we compare performance of foreign owned vs domestic banks first using a descriptive approach then in a more systematic manner using econometric analysis panel data estimations reveal that financial liberalization in general had a beneficial impact on bank behavior in colombia by increasing competition lowering intermediation costs and improving loan quality although the positive contribution of foreign entry may be overstated in recent studies by not controlling for other liberalization factors foreign and domestic entry beginning in 1990 did improve bank behavior by enhancing operative efficiency and competition however the greater competition may have resulted in increased risk and a subsequent deterioration in loan quality particularly among domestic banks

the performance of the heckscher ohlin vanek model in predicting endogenous policy forces at the individual level this study tests the hypothesis that agents base their opinions about trade liberalization on the distribution effects as predicted by the heckscher ohlin vanek hov model the hov model is utilized to derive the probable effect of a liberalization move on the returns to different canadian occupations the predicted effect is then compared with the opinions that canadians with known occupations held about the proposed canadian u s free trade agreement of 1988 it is found that these agents took positions that were generally consistent with the prediction from the hov model

trade policy preferences and factor abundance abstract this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of public opinion towards free trade investigating cleavages both between and within countries we study the distributional effects of trade policy in a neoclassical heckscher ohlin economy with not just two but many input factors in production we demonstrate that the factor price changes induced by trade policy are negatively associated with the factor content of free trade and therefore factor abundance using large scale international survey data we test whether these predicted distributional effects are reflected in the trade policy preferences of workers with different labor market skills in order to isolate the effects of factor abundance from other skill related confounding factors we employ a within skill group estimator that exploits the cross country variation in factor abundance in line with theory the data show that individuals whose skills are in more abundant domestic supply have significantly more positive attitudes towards trade

preferences for international redistribution the divide over the eurozone bailouts why do voters agree to bear the costs of bailing out other countries despite the prominence of public opinion in the ongoing debate over the eurozone bailouts voters preferences on the topic are poorly understood we conduct the first systematic analysis of this issue using observational and experimental survey data from germany the country shouldering the largest share of the eu s financial rescue fund testing a range of theoretical explanations we find that individuals own economic standing has limited explanatory power in accounting for their position on the bailouts in contrast social dispositions such as altruism and cosmopolitanism robustly correlate with support for the bailouts the results indicate that the divide in public opinion over the bailouts does not reflect distributive lines separating domestic winners and losers instead the bailout debate is better understood as a foreign policy issue that pits economic nationalist sentiments versus greater cosmopolitan affinity and other regarding concerns

what determines individual trade policy preferences abstract this article provides new evidence on the determinants of individual trade policy preferences using individual level survey data for the united states there are two main empirical results first we find that factor type dominates industry of employment in explaining support for trade barriers second we find that home ownership also matters for individuals trade policy preferences independent of factor type home ownership in counties with a manufacturing mix concentrated in comparative disadvantage industries is correlated with support for trade barriers this finding suggests that in addition to current factor incomes driving preferences as in standard trade models preferences also depend on asset values

is there a consensus among economists in the 1990 s in a 1976 survey kearl et al 1979 hereafter the 1976 survey concluded that the then widespread perception that there was little agreement among professional economists on matters of theory or policy was simply wrong however the most casual empiricism namely the continuing popularity of jokes about disagreements among economists suggests the perception of noneconomists has not changed much since the 1970 s what is the present state of consensus among economists this question is of interest because more than a decade has elapsed since the 1976 survey and during this time many issues confronting economists and the composition of the profession have changed 1 benjamin m friedman and lawrence h summers 1991 p ix for example have asserted that economic thinking in many subfields of the discipline now differs markedly from what it was in 1970 consensus among european economists has been examined by bruno s frey et al 1984 martin ricketts and edward shoesmith 1990 1992 focus exclusively on british economic opinion this paper provides the first general analysis of opinions of u s economists in more than a decade i the survey and questionnaire

foreign entry and the mexican banking system 1997 2007 proquest denotes formulae omitted in recent years governments around the world have been opening up their banking systems to foreign competition with the expectation of making them more efficient stable and resilient to shocks academics and policymakers have therefore been exploring the effects of foreign bank entry from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view most studies conclude that foreign entry increases the contestability of markets thereby reducing administrative costs lowering net interest margins nims and driving down bank rates of return nevertheless as clarke and others note much of what we know comes from cross country studies that are heavily weighted toward developed economies 1 this is particularly crucial because the impact of foreign entry may vary with the level of economic development 2the literature to date on foreign bank entry in developing economies does not provide a consensus set of results there is some evidence that foreign entry increases social welfare clarke cull and martinez peria find that enterprises in countries with high levels of foreign bank participation tend to rank interest rates and access to long term loans as lesser constraints on their operations and growth than do enterprises in countries with low levels of foreign bank participation 3 martinez peria and mody analyzing a group of latin american cases in a pooled time series cross sectional framework find that foreign banks charge lower interest rate spreads than domestically owned banks 4 they also find that foreign bank entry is associated with an overall increase in administrative efficiency and a decrease in interest spreads suggesting that foreign entry spurred competition denizer obtains similar results in a study of turkey foreign entry reduced domestic bank overhead expenses as well as bank profitability 5 unite and sullivan find that foreign entry was associated with declines in interest rate spreads overhead expenses and profits in the philippines but the effect was confined to domestic banks that had been tied to business groups 6 kasekende and sebudde report that foreign banks in uganda have better internal control mechanisms than domestic banks in terms of judging the quality of borrowers 7not all the evidence points in the same direction however havrylchyk finds that foreign banks in poland are more efficient than domestic banks but then shows that the efficiency gains are all located in so called greenfield banks domestic banks that are acquired by foreign banks do not become more efficient 8 cardim de carvalho finds no differences between foreign and domestic banks in brazil in terms of credit allocation or technical efficiency 9 indeed technical progress in online banking and automation in brazil has been introduced more aggressively by domestically owned banks claessens demirguc kunt and huizinga find that foreign banks operating in developing economies have higher overhead expenses charge higher interest margins and earn higher rates of return than domestic banks 10foreign banks may also be less willing to extend credit on the basis of softknowledge about firms than domestically owned banks studies of argentina and pakistan suggest that foreign entry may therefore give larger firms even greater advantages by exacerbating problems of differential access to capital 11 the finding that foreign banks eschew soft knowledge lending is supported by multicountry studies that use panel data techniques detragiache tressel and gupta report that foreign entry in a panel of poor economies is associated with a net reduction in total lending to the private sector foreign banks appear to have skimmed offthe best credit risks leaving domestic banks with a pool of weaker borrowers from which to select 12 a related body of research suggests that foreign banks represent a trade offfor a developing country galindo micco and powell develop a model and present evidence indicating that foreign banks may be less susceptible to funding shocks than domestic banks because they can tap capital from their home institutions but at the same time foreign banks are more reactive to shocks that affect expected returns

pro market institutions and global strategy the pendulum of pro market reforms and reversals we review the literature analyzing the impact of pro market institutions on firms global strategy we propose that the ideological tension between whether the government or the market should drive economic development results in a pendulum of pro market reforms and reversals that drive changes in firm strategy and performance much progress has been made in the analyses of pro market reforms and their impact on firms international strategies and performance however there is a need to further learn about four areas 1 the concept of pro market institutions in particular the variety of institutional dimensions the measures and the influence of informal institutions on firm strategies 2 the drivers of changes in pro market institutions especially firms influences and the co evolution of firm strategies and institutional changes 3 the implications of changes in pro market reforms for the interactions among integration diversification and internationalization strategies the causality chains connecting institutions and strategies and the reconfiguration of activities globally and 4 the non traditional moderators that alter the impact of pro market institutional dynamics on firms strategies such as country level political systems industry level competitor reactions and individual level managerial capabilities and perceptions

how can economic interests influence support for free trade recent research on the sources of individual attitudes toward trade policy comes to very different conclusions about the role of economic self interest the skeptical view suggests that long standing symbolic predispositions and sociotropic perceptions shape trade policy opinions more than one s own material well being we believe this conclusion is premature for two reasons first the practice of using one attitude to predict another raises questions about direction of causation that cannot be answered with the data at hand this problem is most obvious when questions about the expected impact of trade are used to predict opinions about trade policy second the understanding of self interest employed in most studies of trade policy attitudes is unrealistically narrow in reality the close relationship between individual economic interests and the interests of the groups in which individuals are embedded creates indirect pathways through which one s position in the economy can shape individual trade policy preferences we use the data employed by mansfield and mutz to support our argument that a more complete account of trade attitude formation is needed and that in such an account economic interests may yet play an important role 1

inflation and government deficits there is a pronounced positive correlation of inflation andgovernment deficits in the united states since world war ii the purpose of this paper is to test the three leading explanationsof this correlation these three explanations are a a deficitincreases prices through a wealth effect b a deficit results inthe federal reserve purchasing debt thus increasing the moneysupply and prices and c expected inflation increases the deficit which is the change in the nominal value of bonds no supportis found for either of the first two hypotheses the results indi cate that expected government deficits have no significance forfuture inflation since world war ii the united states has experienced large federal government deficits and a sustained peacetime inflation three differentconnections between the deficits and inflation are prominent in theliterature the most direct connection between government deficits and inflationis that by increasing the real value of outstanding bonds and perceived netwealth a deficit can raise total spending and the price level this connec tion is also the most long standing and is suggested by metzler 1951 andpatinkin 1965 for example monetarists generally and buchanan and wagner 1977 in particularhave emphasized a different link between deficits and inflation they sug gest that the federal reserve purchases government bonds when the trea sury sells bonds thus increasing high powered money the money supply and the price level the federal reserve might behave this way for exam ple because it is attempting to hold down interest rates on governmentsecurities when deficits occur recently barro 1978 1979 has put forward a hypothesis that deficitsare a result of inflation rather than inflation being a result of deficits thegovernment deficit is the change in the nominal value of outstanding gov ernment bonds if the anticipated inflation rate increases then the nomi nal value of bonds must increase i e the government will run a deficit tokeep the same anticipated real amount of bonds all three of these possible connections between government deficitsand inflation are consistent with the observed positive correlation of defi cits and inflation the implications however are strikingly different con

explaining mass support for agricultural protectionism evidence from a survey experiment during the global recession why are citizens in advanced industrialized countries willing to accept high prices for agricultural products conventional wisdom suggests that agricul tural interests secure government protection because producers are concentrated and better politically organized than diffused consumers due to its focus on pro ducer capacity for collective action however the literature fails to account for the high levels of mass support for agricultural protectionism in advanced industrial ized nations this article presents new evidence from a survey experiment in japan conducted during the recent global recession december 2008 that accounts for this puzzle using randomly assigned visual stimuli the experiment activates respon dents identification with either producer or consumer interests and proceeds to ask attitudinal questions regarding food imports the results suggest that consumer priming has no reductive or additive effects on the respondents support for liberal izing food imports surprisingly producer priming increases respondents opposi tion to food import particularly among those who fear future job insecurity we further disentangle the puzzling finding that consumers think like producers on the issue of food import along two mechanisms sympathy for farmers and projec tion of their own job insecurity the results lend strong support to the projection hypothesis

immigration integration and support for redistribution in europe immigration poses individual or collective economic risks that might increase citizen support for government redistribution but it can also generate fiscal pressure or undermine social solidarity to diminish such support these offsetting conditions obscure the net effects of immigration for welfare states this article explores whether immigration s effects are mediated by the economic and social integration of immigrants integration can be conceptualized and measured as involving the degree to which immigrants suffer unemployment rates depend on welfare state benefits and harbor social attitudes similarly to the native population such integration may alter how immigration reduces solidarity and imposes fiscal and macroeconomic pressures but does not much alter how immigration spurs economic risks for natives where migrants are more integrated by such measures immigration should have less negative or more positive implications for native support for government redistribution and welfare states than where migrants are less integrated the article explores these arguments using survey data for twenty two european countries between 2002 and 2010 the principal finding is that economic integration more than sociocultural integration softens the tendency of immigration to undermine support for redistributive policies

geography international trade and political mobilization in u s industries posed industries geographic concentration strongly increases a the formation of common trade policy preferences among workers b employees contributions to political campaigns and c voter turnout this activism traces not to the behavior of political elites but rather to the increased possibility for collective action that spatial proximity affords individuals in trade exposed industries es eography is everywhere in vogue from studies of silicon valley effects and industrial agglomeration audretsch 1998 dyer 1994 to the pricing practices of monopolies from corporate alliances to regional economic development porter 1998 the spatial proximity of firms is shedding new light on some of the most enduring puzzles in business and economics yet despite this interest in industrial clusters few studies have asked and fewer still have empirically assessed how spatial proximity conditions an industry s political behavior this link is particularly important for sectors exposed to international trade given the longstanding debate over how geographic concentration affects an industry s ability to secure import relief recent studies busch and reinhardt 1999 mcgiliivray 1997 find that spatially proximate industries are indeed more successful in gaining protection although the mechanisms by which they exert greater political influence remain little understood we seek to explain how geographic concentration facilitates political mobilization on the part of trade exposed industries geographic concentration bolsters an industry s capacity for collective action in particular as a wide variety of literatures insists spatial proximity facilitates greater face to face communication aids in the diffusion of specialized political knowledge provides the basis for denser social networks and enables more effective monitoring and sanctioning of those who might free ride on the political contributions of others in short individuals in geographically concentrated groups are more likely to recognize and act upon their collective interests yet spatial proximity alone is not sufficient to motivate political mobilization underlying common interests must exist as well looking at manufacturing industries we hypothesize

government spending and public support for trade in the oecd an empirical test of the embedded liberalism thesis according to the embedded liberalism thesis governments committed to free trade provide insurance and other transfers to compensate those who lose economically from expanded trade the goal of this spending is to maintain public support for trade liberalization we provide a micro level test of the critical assumption behind the embedded liberalism thesis that government programs designed to protect individuals harmed by imports reduce opposition to free trade our micro results have important implications for the macro relationship between trade and government spending which we also test we find empirical support for the embedded liberalism thesis in both our micro and macro level analyses earlier versions of this article were presented at the midwest political science association s 2002 meeting and at the university of illinois during summer 2003 we thank the respective panel and seminar participants for their feedback in addition we want to acknowledge valuable comments from william bernhard rebecca blank kerwin charles alan deardorff john dinardo john freeman brian gaines jim granato nathan jensen william keech layna mosley robert pahre ken scheve marina whitman two anonymous reviewers and lisa martin they of course are not responsible for any errors

a referendum on trade theory voting on free trade in costa rica research on mass opinion in international political economy overwhelmingly relies on survey data this poses problems of external validity especially for a frequently low salience issue such as trade policy to examine whether survey findings about attitudes toward economic openness apply outside of surveys this note considers patterns of voting in the 2007 costa rican plebiscite about joining the central american free trade area several extant theories appear to explain voting patterns but the results are less in line with traditional economic models based on locally important economic sectors

do concerns about labor market competition shape attitudes toward immigration new evidence abstract are concerns about labor market competition a powerful source of anti immigrant sentiment several prominent studies have examined survey data on voters and concluded that fears about the negative effects of immigration on wages and employment play a major role generating anti immigrant attitudes we examine new data from a targeted survey of u s employees in 12 different industries in contrast with previous studies the findings indicate that fears about labor market competition do not appear to have substantial effects on attitudes toward immigration and preferences with regard to immigration policy among this large and diverse set of voters

who supports free trade in latin america this paper examines individual trade policy preferences across 17 countries in latin america the focus is on whether skilled or unskilled workers are more likely to support liberalised trade and on whether country characteristics such as factor endowments alter the preferences of skilled and unskilled workers based on the standard heckscher ohlin model and the stolper samuelson theorem wage inequality in developing countries will decrease under free trade and unskilled workers will benefit we find that on average skilled workers are more likely than unskilled workers to support free trade in latin american countries separate country regressions reveal that this pattern is only statistically significant in 8 out of 17 latin american countries however there are no countries in our sample in which unskilled workers are statistically more likely to support free trade than skilled workers not even in the lowest skill endowed country in the sample we also find that people from latin american countries with higher gdp faster growth more cropland and a longer period of time since reform were more likely on average to support free trade

who supports global economic engagement the sources of preferences in american foreign economic policy in this article we bring together opposing international relations theories to better understand u s foreign policy in particular foreign trade and aid using votes in the u s house of representatives from 1979 2004 we explore different theoretical predictions about preferences for foreign economic policy we assess the impact of domestic factors namely political economy and ideological preferences versus foreign policy pressures our three main results highlight the differential effect of these factors in the two issue areas first aid preferences are as affected by domestic political economy factors as are trade preferences second trade preferences but not economic aid ones are shaped by the president s foreign policy concerns for economic aid domestic political economy factors matter more than foreign policy ones third aid preferences are shaped more by ideological factors than are trade ones but ideology plays a different substantive role in each different constituencies support aid and trade this finding has implications for foreign policy substitutability the internationalist coalition in u s foreign policy statist theories of foreign policy and the connection between public opinion and legislative voting

the impact of in group favoritism on trade preferences using a population based survey experiment this study evaluates the role of in group favoritism in influencing american attitudes toward international trade by systematically altering which countries gain or lose from a given trade policy americans and or people in trading partner countries we vary the role that in group favoritism should play in influencing preferences our results provide evidence of two distinct forms of in group favoritism the first and least surprising is that americans value the well being of other americans more than that of people outside their own country rather than maximize total gains americans choose policies that maximize in group well being this tendency is exacerbated by a sense of national superiority americans favor their national in group to a greater extent if they perceive americans to be more deserving second high levels of perceived intergroup competition lead some americans to prefer trade policies that benefit the in group and hurt the out group over policies that help both their own country and the trading partner country for a policy to elicit support it is important not only that the us benefits but also that the trading partner country loses so that the us achieves a greater relative advantage we discuss the implications of these findings for understanding bipartisan public opposition to trade

audience features and the strategic timing of trade disputes if international institutions are such potent alarm mechanisms that mobilize procompliance domestic audiences as many existing theories argue why do countries wait so long before sounding the alarm world trade organization wto members often wait months or even years before objecting to their trading partners wto illegal barriers to turn a phrase trade cooperation delayed is trade cooperation denied so why wait to explain this variation i develop a theory of institutional alarm mechanisms in which 1 the preferences and strength of the audience hearing the alarm vary and 2 the decision to sound the alarm is strategic sounding the alarm is most valuable when strong audiences in the defendant country support compliance i test this prediction using competing risks models analyzing the timing of wto disputes against us tariff barriers consistent with the theory disputes are more likely during election years when macroeconomic indicators suggest broader support for free trade

us versus them mass attitudes toward offshore outsourcing economists have argued that outsourcing is another form of international trade however based on a representative national survey of americans conducted in 2007 and 2009 the distribution of preferences on these two issues appears to be quite different this article examines the origins of attitudes toward outsourcing focusing on the extent to which it reflects 1 the economic vulnerabilities of individuals 2 the information they receive about outsourcing including their subjective understanding of what constitutes outsourcing and 3 noneconomic attitudes toward foreign people and foreign countries the findings emphasize the importance of variations in understandings of the term as well as the highly symbolic nature of attitudes toward this issue individuals who believe the us should distance itself from international affairs more generally who are nationalistic or who feel that members of other ethnic and racial groups within the us are less praiseworthy than their own group tend to have particularly hostile reactions to outsourcing the informational cues people receive are also important influences on their understanding of and attitudes toward outsourcing experimental results further emphasize the symbolic nature of attitudes toward outsourcing taken together the results strongly suggest that attitudes are shaped less by the economic consequences of outsourcing than by a sense of us versus them

why is trade reform so popular in latin america a consumption based theory of trade policy preferences despite wavy national economies and a perception among observers that economic globalization is growing increasingly unpopular aggregate support for free trade remains quite high across latin america this finding is robust to the wording of survey questions and has been quite resilient through time even in the face of economic stagnation current theories of trade preferences including the widely applied heckscher ohlin model do not explain this trend instead the author proposes a theory of trade preferences based not on what citizens produce but on what they consume statistical analyses of different surveys including one conducted in fourteen latin american countries demonstrate that a consumption based approach best accounts for trade preferences across individuals and countries moreover the theory provides an explanation for the overall popularity of free trade in latin america citizens recognize and appreciate the lower price increased variety and higher quality of goods that have come in the wake of trade liberalization

the ecological fallacy revisited aggregate versus individual level findings on economics and elections and sociotropic voting several aggregate level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes operating in intuitively plausible directions more recent survey based studies however have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual voter level this persistent discrepancy is puzzling one recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or sociotropic fashion responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare rather than in terms of self interested pocketbook considerations it is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro and micro level studies are a statistical artifact arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components a government induced and politically relevant component and an exogenous component caused by life cycle and other politically irrelevant factors it is shown that because of this individual level cross sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign an aggregate level time series analysis on the other hand will often yield reasonably good if somewhat attenuated estimates of the underlying individual level effects of interest thus in this case individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate rather than individual level data it is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self interested pocketbook voting

why are some people and countries more protectionist than others we analyze two cross country data sets that contain information on attitudes toward trade as well as a broad range of socio demographic and other indicators we nd that pro trade preferences are signi cantly and robustly correlated with an individual s level of human capital in the manner predicted by the factor endowments model preferences over trade are also correlated with the trade exposure of the sector in which an individual is employed individuals in non traded sectors tend to be the most pro trade while individuals in sectors with a revealed comparative disadvantage are the most protectionist third an individual s relative economic status has a very strong positive association withpro trade attitudes finally non economic determinants in the form of values identities and attachments play an important role in explaining the variation in preferences over trade high degrees of neighborhood attachment and nationalism patriotism are associated withprotectionist tendencies c

attitudes toward highly skilled and low skilled immigration evidence from a survey experiment past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti immigrant sentiment among native citizens concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services we provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide u s survey the labor market competition model predicts that natives will be most opposed to immigrants who have skill levels similar to their own we find instead that both low skilled and highly skilled natives strongly prefer highly skilled immigrants over low skilled immigrants and this preference is not decreasing in natives skill levels the fiscal burden model anticipates that rich natives oppose low skilled immigration more than poor natives and that this gap is larger in states with greater fiscal exposure in terms of immigrant access to public services we find instead that rich and poor natives are equally opposed to low skilled immigration in general in states with high fiscal exposure poor rich natives are more less opposed to low skilled immigration than they are elsewhere this indicates that concerns among poor natives about constraints on welfare benefits as a result of immigration are more relevant than concerns among the rich about increased taxes overall the results suggest that economic self interest at least as currently theorized does not explain voter attitudes toward immigration the results are consistent with alternative arguments emphasizing noneconomic concerns associated with ethnocentrism or sociotropic considerations about how the local economy as a whole may be affected by immigration

support for free trade self interest sociotropic politics and out group anxiety although it is widely acknowledged that an understanding of mass attitudes about trade is crucial to the political economy of foreign commerce only a handful of studies have addressed this topic these studies have focused largely on testing two models both of which emphasize that trade preferences are shaped by how trade affects an individual s income the factor endowments or heckscher ohlin model posits that these preferences are affected primarily by a person s skills the specific factors or ricardo viner model posits that trade preferences depend on the industry in which a person works we find little support for either of these models using two representative national surveys of americans the only potential exception involves the effects of education initial tests indicate that educational attainment and support for open trade are directly related which is often interpreted as support for the heckscher ohlin model however further analysis reveals that education s effects are less representative of skill than of individuals anxieties about involvement with out groups in their own country and beyond furthermore we find strong evidence that trade attitudes are guided less by material self interest than by perceptions of how the u s economy as a whole is affected by trade

the determinants of bank interest rate margins an international study abstract this paper studies the determinants of bank net interest margins nims in six selected european countries and the us during the period 1988 1995 for a sample of 614 banks we apply the ho and saunders model ho t saunders a 1981 the determinants of bank interest margins theory and empirical evidence journal of financial and quantitative analyses 16 581 600 to a multicountry setting and decompose bank margins into a regulatory component a market structure component and a risk premium component the regulatory components in the form of interest rate restrictions on deposits reserve requirements and capital to asset ratios have a significant impact on banks nims the empirical results suggest an important policy trade off between assuring bank solvency high capital to asset ratios and lowering the cost of financial services to consumers low nims the more segmented or restricted the banking system both geographically and by activity the larger appears to be the monopoly power of existing banks and the higher their spreads macro interest rate volatility was found to have a significant impact on bank nims this suggests that macro policies consistent with reduced interest rate volatility could have a positive effect in reducing bank margins