Research

Abstract: In theory, a country will impose tariff barriers to protect the domestic industries and firms that are less competitive relative to foreign imports. This study investigates whether Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) is related to tariff protection in the three large North American economies. I find little evidence for the hypothesis that higher RCA values always correspond to lower tariff levels. The effects of RCA on tariffs are heterogeneous across sectors; consumer goods are likelier to see higher tariffs as RCA increases than agricultural or other goods. These results challenge the theory that export-competitive goods will necessarily receive less tariff protection.

Replication Data

Abstract: To what extent does variation in access to local governance explain partisan sorting in the United States? Prior research shows that voters do not sort into neighborhoods based on partisan concerns alone. However, political attitudes are related to many residential preferences such as taste for local public goods, making partisanship alone a weak treatment. To overcome this limitation, I exploit discontinuous changes in the provision of public services at the institutional boundaries between incorporated and unincorporated areas. I document a 3 percentage-point decline in electoral support for Democrats in areas just outside city limits. City-level measures of socioeconomic factors -- but not of public finance or taxation -- predict partisan sorting. Non-white and college-educated cities are more Democratic than their outskirts, while places with high incomes and housing values are comparatively more Republican. Examining the universe of U.S. cities, this study uncovers the link between local political institutions and geographic partisan sorting. 

Preliminary Abstract: We investigate the increase over time in out-of-district congressional campaign contributions by individual donors relative to contributions in their home districts. After confirming secular trends in the relative incidence of these kinds of contributions, we demonstrate that the pattern holds for both small and large donors, but is considerably muted for the latter. Next, we quantify the extent to which these secular trends are driven by changes in the behavior of recurrent individual donors versus replacement of more locally-focused donors by more nationally-focused ones. Our analysis indicates that both mechanisms play roughly equivalent roles. Finally, we examine the extent to which shifts in the electoral security of a contributor’s member of Congress induce changes in national focus, and whether any such relationship has itself evolved over the past four decades; we recover only modest effects. The conjunction of our findings findings hints at adjustment by individual donors in response to changing macropolitical realities, and only secondarily to changes in donors’ local political environments.