Experience
Trade Research
Research assistant to Professor David Kuenzel · Wesleyan Economics and QAC · 2026–present
I study how U.S. imports change before and after antidumping, countervailing-duty, and safeguard actions. For my summer poster, I linked trade-remedy cases to 35 years of import records and estimated models on 54.6 million observations.
- Quarterly U.S. imports, 1990–2024
- 35 years
- Observations in the poster regression
- 54.6M
- Remedies: antidumping, countervailing duties, safeguards
- 3
The data
The project uses quarterly U.S. Census import data built from monthly files compiled by Peter Schott, linked at the exporter × product × quarter level to the World Bank’s Temporary Trade Barriers Database. To follow products across changes in the tariff code system, I use HTS10 codes grouped into Pierce–Schott concordance families.
My part
Working with Professor David Kuenzel, I built binary and count measures for the three remedies across four stages: the year before an investigation, the formal investigation, preliminary duties, and final duties. I estimated Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) models with exporter–product, exporter–quarter, and product–quarter fixed effects in Stata and R, and plotted the value-weighted share of imports covered by these measures, including by exporter.
What the summer poster found
In that specification, final duties were associated with 26.5% lower import values overall: 44.5% lower for countervailing duties and 27.0% lower for antidumping duties. The safeguard estimate was small and not statistically significant. I presented the poster, “The Trade Effects of US Temporary Trade Barriers: When Do They Start and How Long Do They Last?”, in July 2026.
Ongoing work
The project continues this academic year. Current work includes aggregating to HS6 products, constructing import unit values (value divided by reported quantity), and linking historical regular U.S. tariff rates to the import panel: a 1990 pilot using WITS/TRAINS data, crosswalks for trading partners, and documenting when each country’s tariff treatment changed.