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1. The Environmental Bias of Trade Policy*

   https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaa042  

   Shapiro, Joseph S (December 2020, The Quarterly Journal of Economics)

   Abstract This article describes a new fact, then analyzes its causes and consequences: in most countries, import tariffs and nontariff barriers are substantially lower on dirty than on clean industries, where an industry’s “dirtiness” is defined as its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per dollar of output. This difference in trade policy creates a global implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions in internationally traded goods and contributes to climate change. This global implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions totals several hundred billion dollars annually. The greater protection of downstream industries, which are relatively clean, substantially accounts for this pattern. The downstream pattern can be explained by theories where industries lobby for low tariffs on their inputs but final consumers are poorly organized. A quantitative general equilibrium model suggests that if countries applied similar trade policies to clean and dirty goods, global CO2 emissions would decrease and global real income would change little. 

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2. Trade openness and the nutrient use of nations

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaebcb  

   Dang, Qian; Konar, Megan; Debaere, Peter (December 2018, Environmental Research Letters)
3. Volatility and the Gains From Trade

   https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA14411  

   Allen, Treb; Atkin, David (January 2022, Econometrica)

   Trade liberalization changes the volatility of returns by reducing the negative correlation between local prices and productivity shocks. In this paper, we explore these second‐moment effects of trade. Using forty years of agricultural micro‐data from India, we show that falling trade costs due to expansions of the Indian highway network reduced the responsiveness of local prices to local yields but increased the responsiveness of local prices to yields elsewhere. In response, farmers shifted their production toward crops with less volatile yields, especially so for those with poor access to risk mitigating technologies such as banks. We then characterize how volatility affects farmers' crop allocation using a portfolio choice framework where returns are determined in general equilibrium by a many‐location, many‐good Ricardian trade model with flexible trade costs. Finally, we structurally estimate the model—recovering farmers' risk‐return preferences from the gradient of the mean‐variance frontier at their observed crop choices—to quantify the second‐moment effects of trade. The simultaneous expansion of both the highway and rural bank networks increased the mean and the variance of farmer real income, with the first‐moment effect dominating such that expected welfare rose 4.4%. But had rural bank access remained unchanged, welfare gains would have been only half as great, as risk mitigating technologies allowed farmers to take advantage of higher‐risk higher‐return allocations. 

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4. A complex network framework for the efficiency and resilience trade-off in global food trade

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac1a9b  

   Karakoc, Deniz Berfin; Konar, Megan (September 2021, Environmental Research Letters)
5. Solving the activity–stability trade-off riddle

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-020-00567-w  

   Liu, Shengwen; Shi, Qiurong; Wu, Gang (January 2021, Nature Catalysis)

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