Subsidizing Rent-Seeking: Antidumping Protection and the Byrd Amendment

Theoretical comparisons of the welfare consequences of tariffs, subsidies and import licenses have relied on the assumption that firms reap no private benefits from the imposition of a tariff. This paper conducts an empirical analysis of whether a recent change in U.S. antidumping law known as the Byrd Amendment bestows private benefits to firms lobbying for tariff protection and, thus, increases the level of rent-seeking in the United States. The results provide strong evidence that industries have chosen to lobby for more tariff protection, or filed more antidumping petitions, since passage of the Byrd Amendment. However, there is less evidence that the number of firms filing these petitions increased under the law. This suggests that the Byrd Amendment only partially alleviates the incentive to free-ride.antidumping, Byrd Amendment, rent-seeking, free-riding, trade protection

Chapter 20: What do interviewers learn? Changes in interview length and interviewer behaviors over the field period. Appendix 20

Appendix 20A Full Model Coefficients and Standard Errors Predicting Count of Questions with Individual Interviewer Behaviors, Two-level Multilevel Poisson Models with Number of Questions Asked as Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Analytic strategyTable A20A.1 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Exact Question Reading with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.2 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Nondirective Probes with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.3 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Adequate Verification with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.4 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Appropriate Clarification with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.5 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Appropriate Feedback with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.6 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Stuttering During Question Reading with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.7 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Disfluencies with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.8 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Pleasant Talk with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.9 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Any Task-Related Feedback with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.10 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Laughter with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.11 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Minor Changes in Question Reading with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.12 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Major Changes in Question Reading with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.13 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Directive Probes with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.14 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Inadequate Verification with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20A.15 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Poisson Regression Models Predicting Number of Questions with Interruptions with Total Number of Questions Asked to Each Respondent as an Exposure Variable, WLT1 and WLT2 Appendix 20B Full Model Coefficients and Standard Errors Predicting Interview Length with Sets of Interviewer Behaviors, Two-level Multilevel Linear Models, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20B.1 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Linear Regression Models Predicting Total Duration, No Interviewer Behaviors, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20B.2 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Linear Regression Models Predicting Total Duration, Including Standardized Interviewer Behaviors, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20B.3 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Linear Regression Models Predicting Total Duration, Including Inefficiency Interviewer Behaviors, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20B.4 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Linear Regression Models Predicting Total Duration, Including Nonstandardized Interviewer Behaviors, WLT1 and WLT2 Table A20B.5 Coefficients and Standard Errors from Multilevel Linear Regression Models Predicting Total Duration, Including All Interviewer Behaviors, WLT1 and WLT2 Appendix 20C Mediation Models for Each Individual Interviewer Behavior Table A20C.1 Indirect, Direct And Total Effect of each Interviewer Behavior on Interview Length through Interview Order, Work and Leisure Today 1 Table A20C.2 Indirect, Direct And Total Effect of each Interviewer Behavior on Interview Length through Interview Order, Work and Leisure Today

Factors contributing to household food insecurity in a rural upstate New York County

In order to identify factors that contribute to household food insecurity in a rural county in upstate New York, we conducted two personal interviews with 193 women who were between the ages of 20 and 40 years, had less than 16 years of education, and had children living at home. Data were collected on sociodemographic characteristics, risk factors for food insecurity, food program participation, and the Radimer/Cornell hunger and food insecurity measures; in addition, each household's food supplies were inventoried. Regression analyses and tree-based partitioning were used to identify the risk factors. The variables significantly (p

The Returns from Rent-Seeking: Campaign Contributions, Firm Subsidies, and the Byrd Amendment

This paper examines Congressional support of the Byrd Amendment, a new antidumping law that directs the U.S. Customs Service to distribute collected duties to protected firms. A critical feature of the Byrd Amendment is that it produces a highly transparent measure of how much each firm is rewarded for its rent-seeking efforts to secure the bill’s passage, specifically the dollar value its Byrd disbursement. Therefore, this policy provides researchers with a unique setting in which to study the link between campaign contributions, Congressional behavior, and the subsequent financial returns to firms. Our empirical results show that campaign contributions from potential beneficiaries increased the likelihood that lawmakers would sponsor the Byrd Amendment. We also show that political contributions from the law’s beneficiaries increased with the rewards that they expected to receive, although not by as much as predicted by some political economy models of trade policy.Byrd Amendment, Antidumping, Campaign Contributions, Political Economy of Trade Policy

The Attack-and-Defense Group Contests: Best-shot versus Weakest-link

This study analyzes a group contest in which one group (defenders) follows a weakest-link whereas the other group (attackers) follows a best-shot impact function. We fully characterize the Nash and coalition-proof equilibria and show that with symmetric valuation the coalition-proof equilibrium is unique up to the permutation of the identity of the active player in the attacker group. With asymmetric valuation it is always an equilibrium for one of the highest valuation players to be active; it may also be the case that the highest valuation players in the attacker group free-ride completely on a group-member with a lower valuation. However, in any equilibrium, only one player in the attacker group is active, whereas all the players in the defender group are active and exert the same effort. We also characterize the Nash and coalition-proof equilibria for the case in which one group follows either a best-shot or a weakest-link but the other group follows an additive impact function

Vortex Molecular Crystal and Vortex Plastic Crystal States in Honeycomb and Kagome Pinning Arrays

Using numerical simulations, we investigate vortex configurations and pinning in superconductors with honeycomb and kagome pinning arrays. We find that a variety of novel vortex crystal states can be stabilized at integer and fractional matching field densities. The honeycomb and kagome pinning arrays produce considerably more pronounced commensuration peaks in the critical depinning force than triangular pinning arrays, and also cause additional peaks at noninteger matching fields where a portion of the vortices are located in the large interstitial regions of the pinning lattices. For the honeycomb pinning array, we find matching effects of equal strength at most fillings B/B_\phi=n/2 for n>2, where n is an integer, in agreement with recent experiments. For kagome pinning arrays, pronounced matching effects generally occur at B/B_\phi=n/3 for n>3, while for triangular pinning arrays pronounced matching effects are observed only at integer fillings B/B_\phi=n. At the noninteger matching field peaks in the honeycomb and kagome pinning arrays, the interstitial vortices are arranged in dimer, trimer, and higher order n-mer states that have an overall orientational order. We call these n-mer states "vortex molecular crystals" and "vortex plastic crystals" since they are similar to the states recently observed in colloidal molecular crystal systems. We argue that the vortex molecular crystals have properties in common with certain spin systems such as Ising and n-state Potts models. We show that kagome and honeycomb pinning arrays can be useful for increasing the critical current above that of purely triangular pinning arrays.Comment: 19 pages, 22 postscript figures. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.

PRODUCTION DECISIONS WITH UNCERTAIN MARKETS: THE CASE OF BT CORN

The effect of marketing uncertainty due to consumer opposition over genetically modified (GM) grain is modeled in the context of a producer's decision to plant GM. The model shows that a tendency to plant less GM acreage and obtain premium prices for Non-GM grain is tempered by increased price risk.Crop Production/Industries,

Additions to fused-fluoride lubricant coatings for reduction of low-temperature friction

Additions to fused-fluoride lubricant coatings for reduction of low temperature frictio