Interest Groups and Trade Policy

Containing eight of Gene Grossman’s and Elhanan Helpman’s previously published articles, this work acts as a compaion to the monograph “Special Interest Politics”. The first three chapters focus on campaign contributions and candidate endorsements – two of the tools that interest groups use in their efforts to influence policy outcomes. The remaining chapters present applications to trade policy issues. Grossman and Helpman demonstrate how the approaches developed in their monograph can shed light on tariff negotiations, and on the viability of bilateral free trade agreements. They also examine the forms that regional and multilateral trade agreements are likely to take and the ways in which firms invest abroad to circumvent trade barriers induced by political pressures.

Author Biography

Gene M. Grossman is the Jacob Viner Professor of International Economics at Princeton University, where he holds a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Economics. He is also the Director of Princeton’s International Economics Section. Elhanan Helpman is Professor of Economics at Harvard University, the Archie Sherman Professor of International Economic Relations at Tel Aviv University, and Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Economic Growth and Policy Program. Grossman and Helpman have collaborated on Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy and Special Interest Politics, and on numerous well-known articles.