prohibitive impact on imports (Staiger and Wolak 1994; Prusa 2001; Bown 2004c), we use as our proxy for lost imports the log of the value of 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) imports of the targeted product in year _t1_ , i.e. the year before the trade remedy was imposed. The 10-digit HTS import data for the United States comes from Feenstra, Romalis and Schott (2002) and updates from the ITC’s _DataWeb_ database.

Second, the removal of the U.S.-imposed trade remedy may not be particularly important to some exporting countries that have substantial access to alternative export markets and can thus “deflect” trade that is eliminated from the U.S. to other markets.<sup>17</sup> Put differently, the removal of the U.S.-imposed remedy may be more beneficial to a less-diversified exporter than to a more-diversified exporter. To address the possibility that this affects the WTO litigation decision, we include as an additional explanatory variable the share of the exporter’s product-level exports to the non-U.S. markets in _t-1_ relative to its total product-level world exports of the goods targeted by the U.S. remedy.<sup>18</sup> We expect this variable to be negatively related to the decision of whether to initiate a dispute – a country that is highly diversified (i.e., with a large share of remedy-affected exports already being exported to third markets), should be less likely to challenge a U.S.-imposed remedy at the WTO, because it more easily shift those lost U.S. exports to such third markets.

Third, we also include the _level_ of the U.S.-imposed trade remedy in the case, which we define as the trade weighted-average final duty reported in the _Federal Register_ . We are admittedly agnostic as to how this variable would affect the likelihood of WTO dispute initiation. While an extremely high duty may also be more likely to indicate an egregious WTO violation (affecting the likelihood of legal success in the dispute, to be discussed in more detail below), there may be a substantial range through which even lowering that duty would still leave it as prohibitive, resulting in a zero market access benefit to the affected exporter for initiating a WTO-challenge. On the other hand, while a lower imposed duty may be less likely to be WTO-inconsistent, a marginal reduction could have a substantially positive market access impact.

17 For evidence on exporting countries ability to “deflect” U.S. trade remedy-affected exports to third markets, see Bown and Crowley (2004).

> 18 Since we are comparing the foreign exports to the non-U.S. markets relative to foreign exports to the world (at the product level), we can no longer use the 10-digit HTS import data as our level of aggregation. Thus, for this variable we use the 6-digit, product level Harmonized System (HS) data derived from the UN’s _COMTRADE_ database, as this is the most disaggregated trade data that is readily comparable across countries.  Nevertheless, this data is only consistently available for 15 of the world’s 30 largest importing countries for the 1992-2003 period required for our sample; therefore, in constructing the ratio, the foreign country’s exports to the “rest of the world” are proxied for by the imports of the following 14 other countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Switzerland, China, Germany, Denmark, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Singapore, Sweden, Turkey and Taiwan.

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