Projects

The U.S.-China Trade War represents the most serious disruption to global supply chains since their emergence. With colleagues at UCI, we investigate firm-level changes in China-based supply chains using a new dataset on foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs). The dataset was scrapped from annual registration records filed with the Ministry of Commerce from 2014-2019 and includes firm name (in Chinese and English), nationality, establishment date, size of investment, registered capital, industry, and location. The data allows us to analyze temporal variation (ex. whether fewer new FIEs in tariff impacted industries since 2018), cross-section variation (ex. whether US FIEs are leaving China at a relatively higher rate), as well as regional variations in FIE registration (ex. more firms registering in border provinces like Guangxi to evade tariffs by transshipping from Vietnam) using this new data.

The TWL is building a dataset on firm-level responses to tariffs from observed political behaviors such submitting a comment, filing for tariff exclusion, or lobbying members of Congress. The goal of this data collection effort is to determine whether U.S. firms pursue an individual exclusion or engage in collective action in response to tariffs and whether the strategy proves to be successful.

The TWL is surveying Kansas City area businesses in partnership with the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce to understand how local firms are impacted by rising tariffs and how they obtain tariff relief. This survey is a module of the Princeton Trade Study (PTS), a multi-campus effort to investigate the impact of trade barriers on U.S. businesses.

The TWL is building a dataset of Chinese economic coercion based on the Threat and Impositions of Economic Sanctions (TIES) codebook. The goal of this effort is to expand existing data to 2019 and provide documentation of episodes. This data categorizes different instruments of economic coercion (tariffs, export controls, investment screening, financial sanctions, etc) used by and against China in order to analyze patterns of escalation and measure their effectiveness.

Minerva's Defense Education and Civilian University Research (DECUR) Partnership aims to develop collaborative basic research partnerships between Defense Professional Military Education (PME) Institutions and Civilian Research Universities by supporting basic research projects that improve capacities in defense-related basic social science to inform Department of Defense (DoD) policymakers and decision leaders. The KU TWL was awarded a DECUR grant to work with researchers at the USAFA, UCSD, and USC to explore the relationship between economic interdependence and national security.

More information: https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article/2470326/economic-interdependence-and-national-security-in-the-21st-century/

This simulation was developed with support from the KU Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE). It is designed as a scaffolded classroom assignment where the students can learn about what’s going on in the Trade War and also reflect on theoretical concepts about trade and investment politics. It is both a teaching tool and also a lab experiment to capture how ideological divides play out in domestic politics and international bargaining in the US-China trade war. The simulation has been successfully implemented at KU, UCSD, Princeton, Arkansas, and UBC.

More information: https://cte.ku.edu/zhang/2020