The Round Trip Effect: Endogenous Transport Costs and International Trade
研究了集装箱船往返航行导致运费负相关的“往返效应”，发现内生运输成本下保护主义关税反而恶化贸易平衡，对贸易政策分析有重要启示。
Container ships travel between a fixed set of origins and destinations in round trips, inducing a negative correlation in their freight rates. I study the implications of this round trip effect on international trade and trade policy. I identify this effect and develop an instrument using it to estimate the impact of transport costs on trade. I simulate counterfactual import tariff increases in a quantitative model and quantify the importance of endogenizing transport costs with respect to this effect: an exogenous transport costs model predicts a trade balance improvement from protectionist policies, while the round trip model finds the opposite.