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December 16, 2007
Sachs-Warner?!
Why are people still using the Sachs-Warner index in empirical work? It's a dummy variable, and it's not driven by the tariff and NTB components. Surely by now someone must have built and made readily available a cross-country data set that better describes trade policy. And if not, that's a project worth pursuing, right?
Posted by Dingel at December 16, 2007 11:50 AM
Comments
You'd think so, but ... I am a political scientist trying to do some political economy work on trade regime effects, and I was shocked to see that there are not good time seris bilateral tariff data anywhere. Definitely something that needs to be done.
Posted by: jj at December 16, 2007 08:41 PM
We either try to measure actual policies (what Sachs-Warner tried to do) or we calculate and estimate policies. Both obviously have problems. In the latter camp, Hiscox & Kastner is probably the most interesting...
Posted by: MK at December 17, 2007 07:42 PM