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Assaf Zimring
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
650-302-3375
assafzim at stanford.edu
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Research
Gains from Trade: Lessons from The 2007-2010 Gaza Blockade (Job Market Paper)
This paper uses detailed household expenditure and firm production data to study the welfare consequences of the blockade on the Gaza Strip between 2007 and 2010. Using the West Bank as a counterfactual, I find that being removed from world markets reduced welfare by 17%-28% on average. Moreover, households with larger pre-blockade expenditure levels experienced disproportionally larger welfare losses. These effects are substantially larger than the predictions of standard trade models. I show that this discrepancy is due to a combination of resource reallocation and reduced productivity. Using firm level data I find that the blockade triggered reallocation of workers across firms and sectors, especially from manufacturing and into services, and from industries that use imported inputs intensively, or export. In addition, labor productivity fell sharply by 24%-29%. This decline was however significantly higher in manufacturing (45%) than in services (5%).
Featured on: Foreign Exchange (National Affairs' blog), Marginal Revolution, Slate's Money Box, and The Dish
Preferential Trading Agreements and Antidumping Duties
Do countries that enter Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) increase the level of protection against non members? If so - in what way? The theoretical literature on this question is divided. Most of the empirical literature on the issue focused on tariffs, finding mixed evidence. This paper focuses on the use of Anti-Dumping (AD) duties, a very flexible and increasingly popular protection measure. I find that following the creation of NAFTA, the U.S. increased the use of AD duties against non NAFTA members in sectors that were exposed to Mexican imports much more than in sectors that were not. I interpret these results as evidence that NAFTA caused an increase in the use of AD duties against non members.
Duration of Patent Protection and the Rate of Obsolescence
In patent systems all over the world, all patents in all industries receive the same duration of patent protection. That is in spite of the fact that in some industries the expected commercial life of an innovation is much longer than in others. This paper presents a simple model that shows that it is optimal to give shorter patent protection in industries in which the expected commercial life of an innovation is shorter.
Do Patent Laws Encourage Innovation? Evidence from Economic History, 1851-1914 (With Petra Moser)
This paper exploits substantial variation in 19th-century patent laws to investigate whether stronger patent laws encourage innovation. It also explores theoretical predictions, which indicate that countries with larger internal markets benefit more from stronger patent laws. Cross-country comparisons of exhibits and prizes at international fairs yield no evidence that countries with stronger patent rights were more innovative. Time series of U.S. patent grants to foreign nationals from 7 countries with substantial changes in domestic laws confirm that stronger patent laws had at best limited effects. There is some evidence that - for countries with higher levels of population and GDP - stronger patent laws are associated higher levels of innovation, but these results are almost exclusively driven by Russia, a large country with weak patent laws and low levels of innovation.
Popular Writing
Columns in The Seventh Eye (Ha'ayin Hashvi'it)
Guest op-eds in Haaretz business section (TheMarker)
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