Search results

AbstractFirms that offshore final production should oppose trade barriers "protecting" their own industry. This pits them against onshore firms, especially when comparative disadvantage is most pronounced, and so fundamentally alters trade policy coalitions. The US-China trade war's exclusion process, where US firms could request that tariffs not be applied to a product, provides a golden opportunity to test this contention. We show that coverage by a tariff in the trade war and firm characteristics associated with offshoring—size, multinationality, and heavy imports from China—interacted to generate firm requests for exclusion from the trade war's tariffs. This finding is robust to input-sourcing and fears of export retaliation as alternative explanations, and across multiple measures of firm size, tariff coverage, and exclusion requests. We therefore test a key piece of the firm-centered model of trade politics and show its value in interpreting the US-China trade war.

Who testifies on US trade agreements before Congress and what do they say? We examine the content of Congressional testimony on US trade agreements, and the selection process which determines who testifies in the first place. We find that testimony is systematically tilted toward a sunny view of trade's positive economic effects, while import competition and offshoring are generally downplayed. We argue that trade's supporters strategically frame their motives for supporting trade agreements, and that pro‐trade committee chairs' decisions on who testifies further skew testimony away from the distributive consequences of globalization within the United States. Congressional hearings on trade agreements therefore represent a key site where the influence of dominant pro‐trade interests is both revealed and reinforced.

We empirically tested the relationship between aesthetic brands and evaluation of their accessories, and also explored the moderating roles of functional complementarity and brand schematicity on this relationship. Participants were 260 undergraduate students in Korea, who took part
in an online experiment. Results showed that there were statistically significant differences in the evaluation of accessory products depending on the level of functional complementarity to the focal brand. Participants were significantly more likely to purchase an accessory of a high, compared
to low, aesthetic brand when functional complementarity was moderate. Further, brand-schematic, compared to brand-aschematic, participants were more likely to purchase an accessory of high aesthetic brands, even when the functional complementarity was low. This demonstrates that when brand-aschematic
participants acquired an aesthetically pleasing brand, they were motivated to buy additional accessories. Marketers may use our findings to develop strategies to increase the extendability of brand accessories.