Essays on International Trade and Supply Chains

In response to growing risks and tensions, countries have implemented a range of policy measures, including tariffs, anti-dumping actions, and subsidies. These policies have spurred worldwide, raising concerns about their impact on international trade. Against this backdrop, it is crucial to discuss how businesses, policymakers, and investors respond to shocks and policies whose effects ripple through supply chains.The three chapters presented in this dissertation explore various aspects of domestic and international supply linkages, analysing how industrial policies, labour and environmental sustainability concerns, and political economy motives interact within buyer-supplier relationships and trade. Chapter 1 examines the impact of politically motivated subsidies on exports in subsidised industries and along domestic supply chains. Chapter 2 investigates how investors respond to labour and environmental reputation shocks that arise in international supply chains through industrial disasters. Chapter 3 explores lobbying and counter-lobbying on trade protection along supply chains, notably how firms (and associations) advocate for or against anti-dumping duties.The first chapter studies the effects of US politically motivated subsidies on exports, both directly (in subsidised industries) and indirectly (in industries connected through domestic buyer-supplier linkages). With industrial policy on the rise, concerns have grown regarding its effects on international trade. Most subsidies are not directly trade-related but target specific industries for a mix of economic, administrative, social, or political reasons. Nevertheless, all subsidies can, directly and indirectly, affect trade flows. Concerns about the effects of subsidies on trade and possible trade distortions are not new. At the multilateral level, subsidies are regulated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) through the Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Agreement (SCMA), which requires states to notify specific subsidies (i.e. targeted to a firm, industry, or region). The agreement also allows countries to impose countervailing duties on foreign-subsided imports in case of competitive harm. Chapter 1 analyses the trade effects of politically motivated subsidies granted to firms by the United States. To this end, I use a unique dataset encompassing all federal subsidies introduced by the United States since 2000. I first document a lack of transparency: despite multilateral trading rules, only a fraction of these subsidies are notified to the WTO. To identify the causal effects of politically motivated subsidies on exports, I exploit exogenous political shocks driven by changes across electoral terms in the identity of politically competitive states (i.e. swing states) before presidential elections. The identification assumption is that expectations on swing states trigger subsidies that would not have occurred otherwise. Using an instrumental variable approach, I find that politically motivated subsidies foster exports in industries directly and indirectly exposed to them. Controlling for industry and time-fixed effects, a 1% increase in subsidies results in a 0.32% rise in exports. The increase in exports in directly subsidised industries outweighs the increase in output. Additionally, a 1% increase in subsidies to suppliers results in a 0.29% rise in exports downstream, while a 1% increase in subsidies to customers leads to a 0.09% increase in exports upstream. Several mechanisms may explain why the effects of subsidies ripple through domestic supply chains, leading to higher exports upstream and downstream. The WTO case law on subsidies and trade requires countries willing to impose a countervailing duty to prove indirect harm from (foreign) subsidies by showing that these subsidies are passed through to prices. In particular, countries have to prove that downstream firms indirectly benefit from upstream subsidies through reduced input prices. Contrary to the WTO case law jurisprudence, I find that US federal subsidies do not suppress input prices. However, they increase producer prices, investment, and value-added in subsidised industries and generate productivity spillovers in downstream and upstream industries. This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate about reforming multilateral trading rules on subsidies by advocating enhanced transparency and a more comprehensive interpretation of the spillover effects of subsidies along supply chains. The second chapter investigates the consequences of industrial disasters on companies involved in global supply chains, focusing on the stock market's reaction to sustainability scandals. As production has become increasingly fragmented, leading firms have often exploited lax regulations in developing countries to reduce costs, sometimes at the expense of labour standards and environmental protection. In recent years, however, labour and environmental scandals have exposed these firms to heightened societal pressure to improve sustainability practices along their supply chains. Chapter 2 examines how the stock market responds to industrial disasters when companies are accused by the media of direct or indirect involvement. By constructing a unique dataset of industrial disasters from 2000 to 2019 and identifying companies implicated by media reports, I document significant stock market losses for these firms. Using an event-study design, I estimate an average decline in stock returns of 1.47 percentage points on the day after a disaster and 3.21 percentage points over the following week. Additionally, stock volatility increases following disasters. I also explore the mechanisms driving this adverse market reaction, focusing on the role of reputation damage, particularly in the context of sustainability. Through natural language processing techniques, I develop a novel index capturing the tone of news articles related to environmental and labour issues. Using a sentiment analysis approach, I find that more negative coverage of industrial disasters correlates with larger stock market losses, suggesting a reputational damage.The third chapter delves into the political economy of trade protection, focusing on lobbying activities related to antidumping (AD) duties. This chapter is a joint work with my supervisor Paola Conconi (Oxford University), Aksel Erbahar (Erasmus University Rotterdam), and Lorenzo Trimarchi (Université de Namur). We present new data and descriptive evidence on US lobbying in favour and against the most widely used trade barrier, namely AD duties. We construct a novel dataset on lobbying on US AD duties from 2008 to 2020, combining detailed information from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act with data on all AD petitions and reviews from the extended version of the World Bank's Temporary Trade Barriers Database, along with new data from ITC hearings. By linking lobbying expenditures to specific AD cases or reviews, we identify firms and associations that lobbied either in support (lobbying) of or against (counter-lobbying) AD policy. Our analysis reveals that a fifth of AD cases were lobbied in the United States from 2008 to 2020. Using information on US Congress subcommittees, we also find that firms are more likely to lobby for protection when they are connected with politicians in Congress. This chapter lays the groundwork for an ongoing, more comprehensive study conducted with the same coauthors, in which we aim to provide causal evidence on how lobbying and counter-lobbying shape AD policy outcomes.