The Ohio State University

Markets and consumers, not president, control oil’s future

The following appeared in the Columbus Dispatch on November 4, 2020: https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/11/04/column-markets-and-consumers-not-president-control-oils-future/6136112002/   Brent Sohngen, AED Economics, Ohio State University For practically 150 years, oil has been at the center of the American economy.  At first, it provided a source…

“Power-Based” Bargaining Over Trade: What Has Been the Economic Cost?

The U.S.-China trade war represents a natural experiment in the sense that we have not seen such wide-ranging increases in tariffs since the 1930s, when Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (Bown and Zhang, 2019).  Not surprisingly, applied trade economists…

“Power-Based” Bargaining Over Trade: Myopic Behavior by the United States?

Analysis of the current administration’s trade policy choices has typically interpreted them in terms of a zero-sum game, i.e., rather than generating mutual benefits in a positive-sum game, international trade is a game where economically, one country is a winner…

China’s Agricultural Import Commitments: Inefficient “Managed” Trade?

In light of the sectors targeted by China’s retaliatory tariffs against U.S. imports, it is not surprising that agriculture was a critical component of the Phase One Trade Agreement between the U.S. and China, that went into effect on February…