Bown and Crowley (2013, in press) interpret US TTB use as increases to the “cooperative” trade policy as in Bagwell and Staiger (1990), and they present evidence that both antidumping and safeguards can be viewed as cooperative tariff increases in response to trade volume shocks. Their estimation of the determinants of US _industry_ -level use of antidumping and safeguards covers 1997-2006 and therefore also includes substantial TTB application of both policies on the US steel sector. Second, at the aggregate level, there is evidence that safeguards can be an important contributor to modern commercial policy adjustments in the face of macroeconomic fluctuations. Bown and Crowley (2011, in press) examine United States TTB policies in higher frequency data over 1988-2010 and find that, relative to models estimated on antidumping alone, the _combination_ of antidumping and safeguards has both a stronger countercyclical response to macroeconomic shocks and a stronger reaction to exchange rate fluctuations.<sup>6</sup> Our results also contribute to the body of research that examines different implications of US use of its safeguards policy. With respect to the 2002 US steel safeguard, Liebman and Tomlin (2007, 2008) provide evidence that government announcements that are associated with the policy affected share prices for at least three different types of firms: steel producers; downstream, steel-consuming industries; and firms that are otherwise unrelated to steel but are connected to the safeguard through the channel of “retaliation” against their exported products that is made possible by European Union tariff threats under a WTO trade dispute. Durling and Prusa (2003) describe the distributional impacts that resulted from the new 2002 safeguard import tariffs on steel slab, which were expected to raise the costs of not only foreign firms, but also of _domestic_ rivals, thereby benefiting US mini-mills at the expense of a number of US vertically-integrated firms.

This paper also relates to other studies of more general questions regarding import protection and the US steel industry. Blonigen et al. (2013), for example, use plant-level data from the US Census Bureau that covered 1967-2002 and provide evidence that quota-based protection has market power effects, with respect to integrated and mini-mill steel plants, whereas tariff-based import protection does not. Furthermore, Blonigen and Wilson (2010) use product- and foreign country-level data to document evidence of the impact of both cyclical and structural excess capacity (which is associated with foreign subsidies) on steel exports to the US that covered 1979-2002.

Finally, research that improves the understanding of the role and implications of safeguards use is increasingly important given that application of this particular TTB has spread to so many countries. Miranda et al. (1998) and Prusa (2001) were among the first to document the proliferation in the adoption and use of _antidumping_ across high-income and emerging economies worldwide. More recently, Bown

> 6 Bown and Crowley (2011, in press) provide evidence of this not only for the United States, but also in a sample of data at the quarterly frequency that includes four other high-income economies over the period 1988-2010.

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