Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: A Dynamic Theory of Mass Preferences for Trade

这项研究调查了公众对贸易政策态度的重要问题。贸易政策的变化导致消费品价格水平的变化。当贸易政策自由化时，主要消费进口商品或进口竞争商品的人因这些商品的价格下降而受益，而消费可出口商品的人因价格上涨而受损。由于消费模式随收入而变化，贸易政策变化对消费价格的影响是分配性的。目前关于大规模贸易优惠的研究-几乎完全侧重于贸易政策变化对收入和/或就业的潜在影响-忽略了这些价格影响。本项目通过对美国公众进行的具有全国代表性的调查，并通过几个嵌入式调查实验，对贸易优惠的动态模型进行了检验，探讨了贸易政策中的价格水平效应如何决定个人层面的贸易政策偏好。该项目还包括与美国经济政策制定者的访谈，以更好地了解公众对经济状况变化的反应如何影响政策制定过程。智力优势：关于大众对全球化的偏好的文献集中于贸易政策的问题领域和贸易政策对收入或就业的潜在影响。尽管有许多研究，但公众对外国经济政策的稳定和一致偏好的程度相对较少达成共识。这项研究增强了现有的贸易政治经济学模型，使个人既关心收入和价格水平的影响，贸易政策的变化。该项目提供了一个假设的机制，通过这个机制，个人可以权衡这些影响：感知的经济不安全感。当人们感到不安全感相对较高时，个人会“退回到安全地带”，倾向于采取保障其就业和/或收入的政策。然而，当经济不安全感相对较低时，个人更有可能倾向于使他们大量消费的商品相对便宜的贸易政策。通过这一贸易优惠的动态模型，本研究致力于解决近年来贸易政策文献中的一个关键争论，并有助于理解现有文献中关于这一主题的相互矛盾的结果。更广泛的影响：研究对公共政策有明确和直接的影响。深入了解美国公民如何权衡生活在日益全球化的经济中的成本和收益，对于设计最大化社会福利的政策非常重要。根据贸易政策制定的“销售保护”模型，贸易政策文献往往假设在贸易政策制定和其他对外经济政策领域存在民主赤字。通过关注贸易政策变化对分配价格水平的影响，研究将评估这种民主赤字是否像以前假设的那样大。

The research investigates important questions about public attitudes toward trade policy. Changes in trade policy lead to changes in price levels of consumer goods. When trade policy is liberalized, people who primarily consume imported or import-competing goods benefit because of decreases in prices for those goods, while people who consume exportable goods lose due to increases in prices. Because consumption patterns vary with income, the consumer price effects of changes in trade policy are distributional. The current research on mass trade preferences - focused almost exclusively on the potential income and/or employment effects of changes in trade policy - ignores these price effects. This project explores how price level effects in trade policy determine trade policy preferences at the individual level, using a nationally representative survey of the U.S. public with several embedded survey experiments to test the dynamic model of trade preferences. The project also includes interviews with U.S. economic policy-makers to better understand how the public's reaction to changes in economic conditions influences the policy-making process. Intellectual Merits: The literature on mass preferences for globalization has focused on the issue area of trade policy and the potential income or employment effects of trade policy. Despite numerous studies, there is relatively little consensus on the extent to which the public has stable and coherent preferences over foreign economic policies. This research augments existing political economy models of trade to allow individuals to be concerned with both income and price level effects of changes in trade policy. The project provides a hypothesized mechanism through which individuals weigh these effects against each other: perceived economic insecurity. When perceived insecurity is relatively high, individuals "retreat to safety" by preferring policies that safeguard their employment and/or income. When economic insecurity is relatively low, however, individuals are more likely to favor trade policies that make the goods that they consume heavily relatively less costly. With this dynamic model of trade preferences, this research works to resolve one of the key debates in the trade policy literature in recent years and help make sense of the conflicting results that pervade the existing literature on this topic. Broader Impacts: The research has clear and direct implications for public policy. Developing a strong understanding of how American citizens weigh the costs and benefits of living in an increasingly globalized economy is important for designing policies that maximize social welfare. Drawing on "protection for sale" models of trade policy creation, the trade policy literature often assumes that a democratic deficit exists in trade policy formation and other foreign economic policy areas. By focusing on distributional price level effects of changes in trade policy, the research will assess if this democratic deficit is as large as previously assumed.