Did US Politicians Expect the China Shock?
利用美国众议院关于中国正常贸易关系地位的多轮投票，通过矩不等式方法检验议员在决策时掌握的信息，并估计选民、意识形态等因素对投票的影响。
Information sets, expectations, and preferences of politicians are fundamental, but unobserved determinants of their policy choices. Employing repeated votes in the US House of Representatives on China’s normal trade relations (NTR) status during the two decades straddling China’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession, we apply a moment inequality approach designed to deliver consistent estimates under weak informational assumptions on the information sets of members of Congress. This methodology offers a robust way to test hypotheses about what information politicians have at the time of their decision and to estimate the weight that constituents, ideology, and other factors have in policy making and voting.