The Optimal Tariff in the Antebellum United States
研究了美国内战前关税政策的效果，指出美国作为棉花主要供应国可能通过关税改善贸易条件并提高国民福利。
Virtually from its founding the United States has not followed a free-trade policy. Tariffs were the principal source of federal revenue in the nineteenth century and protection of domestic industries was a significant factor as well from the first tariff act of 1789 onward (see Frank Taussig, pp. 14-15). One of the more interesting (and controversial, at least in the antebellum period) questions in American economic history as well as in international trade and development is what the effects of such a protective policy in fact were. It is well known that a country with monopoly power in international trade can improve its lot over the free-trade equilibrium. Up to some point by increasing its tariff, it should be able by improving its terms of trade also to increase national welfare. The antebellum United States may well have had such power due to its position as the major world supplier of raw cotton. In the period between 1840 and 1860, the United States produced almost two-thirds of world cotton output, while the United Kingdom, the major customer of new cotton, purchased