International Trade and Investment.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Program on International Trade and Investment met in Cambridge on March 28 and 29. Program Director Robert C. Feenstra, NBER and University of California, Davis, organized. this program:

Andrew K. Rose, NBER and University of California, Berkeley, "Do We Really Know that the WTO Increases Trade?"

Bruce A. Blonigen, NBER and University of Oregon, "Evolving Discretionary Practices of U.S. Antidumping Activity"

Andrew B. Bernard, NBER and Dartmouth College; J. Brandford Jensen, Institute for International Economics; and Peter K. Schott, NBER and Yale University, "Falling Trade Costs, Heterogeneous Firms, and Industry Dynamics"

Wolfgang Keller, NBER and University of Texas, Austin, and Stephen R. Yeaple, University of Pennsylvania, "Multinational Enterprises, International Trade, and Productivity Growth: Firm-Level Evidence from the United States" (NBER Working Paper No. 9504)

Joshua Aizenman, NBER and University of California, Santa Cruz, and Mark M. Spiegel, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, "Institutional Efficiency, Monitoring Costs, and the Investment Share of FDI"

Donald R. Davis and David Weinstein, NBER and Columbia University, "A Search for Multiple Equilibria in Urban Industrial Structure"

Pinelopi K. Goldberg, NBER and Yale University; and Nina Pavcnik, NBER and Dartmouth College, "The Responses of the Informal Sector to Trade Liberalization" (NBER Working Paper No. 9443)

Rose estimates the effect on international trade of multilateral trade agreements: the World Trade Organization (WTO); its predecessor, the Generalized Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); and the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) extended from rich countries to developing countries. He uses a standard "gravity" model of bilateral merchandise trade and a large panel data set covering over 50 years and 175 countries. An extensive search reveals little evidence that countries joining or belonging to the GATT/WTO have different trade patterns from outsiders. The GSP does seem to have a strong effect, and is associated with an approximate doubling of trade.

Previous literature has discussed the procedural biases that exist in U.S. Department of Commerce (USDOC) calculations of dumping margins. Blonigen examines the evolution of discretionary practices and their role in the rapid increase in average USDOC dumping margins since 1980. He finds that USDOC discretionary practices, including use of "facts available" and cost of production tests, have...