In this article, we analyze whether the Softwood Lumber Agreement between the United States and Canada imposed significant economic costs on industries that use softwood lumber in the United States. To ascertain this impact, we use an event study. Our event study analyzes variations in the stock prices of lumber-using firms listed at the major stock markets in the United States. We find that the news of events leading to the Softwood Lumber Agreement had significant negative impacts on the stock prices of industries using softwood lumber. The average reduction of stock prices for our sample of firms was approximately 5.42% over all the events considered. Article first published online: 20 OCT 2009 [go to paper]

The main aim is to question why we don't see more firms petitioning for import relief. It is well accepted that petitioning itself can restrain imports, lead to higher prices and hence higher profits (in the short run). What prevents more firms from filing for protection? It may be that petitioning reflects cost inefficiency on the part of the petitioning firm, and concerns about revealing this information might act as a deterrent for firms to come forward with their complaints. However, in a declining industry where a large number of firms are contemplating an exit, petitioning could be a signal that the firm expects to remain in the market for the near future. The signalling hypothesis is tested by comparing the stock market response of an antidumping petition for petitioning firms and non-petitioning firms producing the same product. link to paper unavailable.

In this article we highlight the anticompetitive nature of antidumping (AD) legislation. Antidumping legislation was set up to protect domestic firms from predatory pricing by foreign firms. We argue that protecting highly concentrated industries drastically reduces competition at home. In cases where the industry consists only of one or two firms, import restriction may breed monopolies at the expense of domestic consumers. This article looks at cases filed by the agriculture sector, and at the market concentration of industries in this sector, to illustrate the above possibility. We study the case of fresh tomatoes in detail to further demonstrate the anticompetitive nature of AD legislation. We show the effect of AD legislation on imports, as well as the change in the Lerner index in the fresh tomato industry. [go to paper]

In this paper we analyze whether U.S. Anti-Dumping (AD) duties in the agricultural sector are effective in restricting trade. More specifically, does the imposition of an antidumping duty restrict imports of the named commodity or is there a diversion in the supply of imports from countries named in the petition to countries not named in the antidumping petition? We find that AD duties have had a significant impact on the imports of agricultural commodities from the countries named in the petition. However, our results also indicate that, unlike the manufacturing sector in the US, there was little trade diversion towards countries not named in the AD petition. Our results indicate that AD is a plausible protectionist policy in the Agriculture sector.[go to paper]

We estimate the degree of trade diversion from provinces named under the Softwood Lumber Agreement(SLA) to provinces not named. Our regression results indicate that the SLA had a significant impact on the exports of non-named SLA provinces. Controlling for other factors, the SLA would have increased exports from these provinces four times. The corresponding effect for the provinces named in the SLA is estimated at minus 5 percent. This decrease is not, however, statistically significant.[go to paper]

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In this paper, we compare the use of antidumping (AD) measures in the agriculture sector by Canada and the United States, the two major users of antidumping procedures.1 We consider both the direct and indirect effects of the AD measure and consider what factors make an AD measure more or less successful at impeding trade and when it is more likely to cause trade diversion. Specifically, we ask when the imposition of an antidumping duty restricts imports of the targeted commodity and when is there a deflection in the supply of imports from countries named in the petition to countries not named in the antidumping petition? We compare these results for that of the US and draw conclusions about the determinants of such differences, like the exchange rate, GDP and distance to partner countries. We use a modified version of the gravity model, as used in the earlier literature (Prusa (2001)) for our analysis. We find that affirmative AD cases caused trade diversion from non-named countries for agricultural products in general, but that trade diversion was particularly strong for perishable products. We also find that the more concentrated the imports, the more restrictive the AD duties.[go to paper]

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