As successive rounds of global trade liberalization have resulted in reductions
in broad, industry-level tariffs, antidumping duties have emerged as an
alternative, WTO-sanctioned way of protecting certain domestic industries.
This paper aimed to examine both whether and in what ways political donations
by filing petitioners affect the outcomes of antidumping cases. Using an
empirical framework based on the Grossman-Helpman “protection for sale”
model, we link case outcomes to political donations by the political action
committees associated with petitioners filing the cases and to industry-level
import demand elasticities and import penetration ratios.
We find that antidumping duty rates tend to be higher for politically-
19active petitioners. The relationship between the import penetration ratio
and duties imposed depends on whether or not petitioners in a case are
politically active — antidumping duties are positively correlated with the
import penetration ratio for politically inactive petitioners, but negatively
correlated for politically active petitioners. Our paper also contributes to
the literature on empirical analysis of the Grossman-Helpman (GH) model;
we provide additional support for the predictions of the model using a fresh
set of data that allows us to avoid making some of the compromises of
previous empirical work