The causes and consequences of United States antidumping laws

Under current U.S. antidumping law, firms can request that the United States impose duties on products from a specific foreign country because these products are being sold at “unfairly” low prices, thereby causing material injury to the domestic industry. The U.S. International Trade Commission estimates that antidumping and countervailing duties, which affect approximately 1.8 percent of total U.S. merchandise imports, represented a net cost to the U.S. economy of {dollar}1.59 billion in 1991. Critics argue that a recent change to the law known as the Byrd Amendment will dramatically increase the number of antidumping petitions filed each year, as well as the total level of antidumping protection in the United States. This dissertation attempts to quantify the impact of the Byrd Amendment on U.S. antidumping protection.; In “The Consequences of U.S. Antidumping Laws: A Structural Model of Firm Participation in Import Relief Petitions,” I construct and then estimate a model in which each firm within a given industry must decide whether or not to participate actively in an antidumping petition. The expected benefits of filing an antidumping petition, which accrue to all firms within an industry, include both the change in profits that result from the government imposing a dumping margin and those that result from the domestic industry reaching a private agreement to terminate the investigation in exchange for a transfer from the foreign industry. Only those firms that participate in the petition pay the significant legal costs associated with filing the petition. Therefore, firms are tempted to free-ride off other firms in the industry. Firms choose to participate in the petition because the expected amount of protection awarded increases as the number of firms participating increases. I construct a panel of antidumping petition outcomes between 1980 and 1996, as well as industry- and country-specific variables, to estimate the model using maximum simulated likelihood. After estimating the parameters of the model, I simulate a number of changes to U.S. antidumping law to predict the impact, of these changes on the number of petitions filed each year and the amount of protection awarded by the government.