The Demand for Trade Protection over the Business Cycle

We build measures of the demand for trade protection, and relate it to permanent productivity and transitory monetary policy shocks identified from the U.S. monthly and quarterly data. The demand for protection is counter-cyclical conditional on productivity shocks and pro-cyclical conditional on monetary policy shocks. We then layout a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with trade in intermediate and final goods, sticky prices, incomplete financial markets and endogenous monetary policy rules, and propose a repeated non-cooperative policy game that determines tariffs endogenously. These tradepolicies (i) are consistent with small but positive tariffs, as in the data, and (ii) fit empirical evidence about the cyclical pattern of the demand for trade protection under a wide range of plausible model calibrations. We then use the model to quantify the macroeconomic and welfare effects of a change in tariff setters' preferences that induces tariffs to rise in both countries.