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Blog

LSE United States Politics and Policy:

Confusing US tariff announcements doubled the decline in trade

During 2025 the US administration made more than 50 tariff-related announcements. In new research, Kalina Manova, Dennis Novy, Thomas Sampson and Aaron Tang examine how the complexity of these announcements disrupted US ...Read more...

Blog

VoxEU:

Tariff confusion

The year 2025 was unprecedented in the frequency, complexity, and volatility of US trade policy interventions. This column uses a new database tracking US tariff announcements during the year to show that confusion about...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Tariff confusion

US trade policy in 2025 was unprecedented in the frequency, complexity and volatility of tariff announcements. This paper presents evidence that the resulting policy environment reduced trade flows because of confusion o...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economics of tariffs

A central insight from neoclassical economics is that international trade operates like an improvement in production technology. It generates mutual aggregate welfare gains for countries as a whole, but creates winners a...Read more...

CentrePiece article

How the US-China trade conflict boosted exports and employment in Mexico

Lower-paid workers in Mexican firms gained as exports shifted....Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The impact of the 2025 US tariff announcements on UK firms

In the first half of 2025, the US and some of its trading partners announced significant changes to import tariffs. This column uses newly designed questions to study the impact of these changes on UK firms and to assess...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

An alliance for open trade: How to counter Trump's tariffs

The US administration's latest threat to impose sweeping new tariffs on many of its closest allies signals a renewed embrace of aggressive unilateralism and misunderstood economics. This column argues that the only effec...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Trade diversion and labor market outcomes

In 2018 and 2019, the US administration increased tariffs on imports from China. Did these tariffs lead to more US imports from other countries such as Mexico? Using highly disaggregated data on the universe of Mexican f...Read more...

CentrePiece article

in brief... How the Trump tariffs affect UK firms

How should UK exporters react to the tariffs imposed by President Trump? While some may start planning to increase production in the United States to avoid the tax, others whose US customers are less price-sensitive may ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Inequalities:

Tariffs, automation and inequality: why US jobs won't return but developing countries will still lose

Headlines around Trump's sweeping tariffs have focused on trade wars, inflation and the geopolitical fallout. But a more profound shift is taking place, argues Viet Nguyen-Tien. Rather than restoring American jobs, these...Read more...

Blog

Vox EU:

The 2025 trade war: Dynamic impacts across US states and the global economy

In 2025, the US government announced a series of tariff increases targeting major trading partners, including Canada, China, and Mexico. This column estimates the economic consequences of these proposed tariffs to the US...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

The UK deals with India, USA and the EU are symbolic

The Labour Government is on a trade deal spree. After signing a free trade agreement with India, the UK made a pact with the US to remove some of the tariffs on UK car and aerospace exports, and finally a new agreement w...Read more...

Blog

Financial Times:

How should central banks respond to US tariffs? (Podcast)

US tariffs have sent financial markets into a frenzy in recent weeks, but how much should central bankers be taking trade into account when setting monetary policy? To find out, Soumaya Keynes sits down with Bank of Engl...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The 2025 trade war: dynamic impacts across US States and the global economy

We use a dynamic trade and reallocation model with downward nominal wage rigidities to quantitatively assess the economic consequences of the recent increase in the U.S. tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China,...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

How the Trump tariffs affect UK firms

How should UK exporters react to the tariffs imposed by President Trump? Some manufacturers may decide to increase production in the US, but those with loyal US consumers who are relatively insensitive to price changes m...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Do Trump's tariffs signal the end of globalisation?

In this second instalment of his interview with Alexis Papazoglou, Thomas Sampson highlights the many uncertainties the future of global trade faces and argues that the biggest policy question for countries around the wo...Read more...

Blog

Imperial College Business School:

How protectionism risks undermining the US economy

Donald Trump's announcement of wide-ranging tariffs has threatened to upend the rules of global trade that have been in place for decades, impacting supply chains and businesses across the world. The US President's pla...Read more...

Blog

Economics Observatory:

Liberation day

Last week's announcement of sweeping US tariffs will have a big impact on global trade. The method used to calculate the tax rates to be charged on imports from individual countries has surprised economists. For the UK, ...Read more...

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Trump's tariffs will put post-Brexit trade policy to the test

With Donald Trump's inauguration imminent, there are questions over the potential consequences of one of his signature policies: tariffs. While during the first Trump administration the UK wasn't too affected by the impo...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Chinese research hinge on US co-authors? Evidence from the China initiative

Launched in November 2018 by the Trump administration, the China Initiative made administrative procedures more complicated and funding less accessible for collaborative projects between Chinese and US researchers. In th...Read more...

Journal article

Oxford Economic Papers:

Economic insecurity and political preferences

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention, but there is no consensus as to its definition. We characterize a class of individual economic-insecurity measures based on the time profile of economic resources. We ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Firm export responses to tariff hikes

We study how firms react to unexpected increases in import tariffs. We identify our results from a sudden removal of American preferential tariffs applied on Argentine imports under the Generalized System of Preferences,...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Who's paying for the US tariffs? A longer-term perspective

Using data from 2018, a number of studies have found that recent U.S tariffs have been passed on entirely to U.S. importers and consumers. These results are surprising given that trade theory has long stressed that tarif...Read more...

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Economic insecurity breeds support for the right

Economic insecurity breeds support for the right Economic insecurity is attracting growing attention in social, academic, and policy circles. It has arguably risen for a number of reasons in recent years: the Great Rece...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Economic insecurity and the rise of the right

Economic insecurity has attracted growing attention in social, academic and policy circles. However, there is no consensus as to its precise definition. Intuitively, economic insecurity is multi-faceted, making any compr...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Economic Perspectives:

The impact of the 2018 tariffs on prices and welfare

We examine conventional approaches to evaluating the economic impact of protectionist trade policies. We illustrate these conventional approaches by applying them to the tariffs introduced by the Trump administration dur...Read more...

CentrePiece article

The impact of the 2018 trade war on US prices and welfare

What has been happening to the US economy as a result of the Trump administration's 2018 round of import tariffs? Research by Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding and David Weinstein estimates the effects of this change in US tra...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The impact of the 2018 trade war on US prices and welfare

This paper explores the impacts of the Trump administration?s trade policy on prices and welfare. Over the course of 2018, the U.S. experienced substantial increases in the prices of intermediates and final goods, dramat...Read more...

Journal article

Fiscal Studies:

The economic effects of Brexit: evidence from the stock market

We study stock market reactions to the Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016 in order to assess investorsi?? expectations about the effects of leaving theEuropean Union on the UK economy. Our results suggest that initial sto...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The economic effects of Brexit - evidence from the stock market

We study stock market reactions to the Brexit referendum on 23 June 2016 in order to assess investors? expectations about the effects of leaving the European Union on the UK economy. Our results suggest that initial stoc...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Brands in motion: how frictions shape multinational production

Following the 2016 Leave vote in the referendum on UK membership in the EU and the election of Donald Trump, trade agreements have entered a period of great instability. To predict the impact of possible disruptions to e...Read more...

CentrePiece article

China shock: the impact on trade and incomes

Is US presidential candidate Donald Trump right when he claims that the Chinese are causing serious damage to American workers? Research by Jo?o Paulo Pessoa analyses the impact of the recent massive increase in China?s ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Special and differential treatment for developing countries

Special and Differential Treatment for Developing Countries (SDT) constitutes a central feature of the GATT/WTO system. Its formal goal is to foster export-led growth in developing countries. Its theoretical foundations ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Regional Trade Agreements

This paper reviews the theoretical and the empirical literature on regionalism. The formation of regional trade agreements has been, by far, the most popular form of reciprocal trade liberalization in the last fifteen ye...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The ASEAN Free Trade Agreement: Impact on Trade Flows and External Trade Barriers

Using detailed data on trade and tariffs from 1992-2007, we examine how the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement has affected trade with non-members and external tariffs facing non-members. First, we examine the effect of preferen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Protection and International Sourcing

We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problem...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Regionalism Affect Trade Liberalization Towards Non-Members?

We examine the effect of regionalism on unilateral trade liberalization using industry-level data on applied MFN tariffs and bilateral preferences for ten Latin American countries from 1990 to 2001. We find that preferen...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Falling Trade Costs, Heterogeneous Firms and Industry Dynamics

This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs. Several new firm-level models of international trade with heterogeneous firms predict that industry productivity will rise as trade cost...Read more...