Essays on administrative protection and trade deflection

This dissertation analyzes the trading effects and the politics of antidumping. The first essay empirically examines the influence of partisanship on antidumping. I show that an increase in the leftist orientation of the government makes labor intensive industries less likely to file an antidumping petition. I also demonstrate that the increase in the leftist orientation of the government is associated with an increase in the likelihood of an affirmative antidumping outcome for the petitions of labor intensive industries. The second essay investigates the effect of past exporting relationships of the firms, whose products are targeted by antidumping duties, on their export flows to alternative markets. My estimations show that facing an antidumping duty on a product leads to a 18% increase in the exports of the firm for that product to the alternative countries where the firms previously exported the same product and a 8% increase to the countries where the firms exported another product. On the contrary, I fail to find a significant effect of antidumping duties on the exports of the particular product to third countries to which the firm did not export before. Further, I show that a firm’s probability to start exporting the duty imposed product in a different destination increases by 8–10% if the firm already exported another product to that destination. However, I find no such evidence for the countries to which the firm did not export before. The third essay empirically analyzes the effect of potential antidumping claims, resulting from an antidumping investigation in the domestic market, on the quality of exported products to the target countries. My findings suggest that retaliation threats increase the quality of firms’ shipments for the named industries’ products to the target countries by 11%. This effect is also significantly increasing in the share of the exports of the named industries’ products shipped to the target country in the firms’ total exports. Further, I show that this effect is 4% higher for the exporters serving the developed countries and 3% higher for ones serving the heavy antidumping users.