The Impact of Trade Agreements on Consumer Welfare—Evidence from the EU Common External Trade Policy
研究了1993至2013年间欧盟新一代贸易协定对消费者福利的影响，发现协定使进口质量平均提升7%，消费者价格指数累计下降0.24%，但对价格和品种无显著影响，且高收入欧盟国家获益更大。
This paper estimates the consumer welfare impact of the new generation of trade agreements implemented by the European Union between 1993 and 2013. We decompose the overall effect into contributions of changes in prices, quality and variety. Estimating trade elasticities for narrow product categories of EU imports, we infer quality from data on imported values and volumes. For the EU as a whole, we find that trade agreements increased quality by 7% on average but did not affect prices or variety. This translates into a cumulative reduction in the consumer price index of 0.24% over our sample period. We also find a high degree of impact heterogeneity across EU countries, trading partners, and the type of trade agreement, with high-income EU countries seeing much stronger quality increases and larger overall consumer benefits.