How States Ration Flexibility: Tariffs, Remedies, and Exchange Rates as Policy Substitutes
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A close look at the commitments of World Trade Organization (WTO) members presents a striking paradox. Most states could raise their duties significantly before falling afoul of their WTO obligations. Moreover, such “binding overhang” varies between countries: some could more than double the amount of trade protection they offer overnight, whereas others are tightly constrained. What accounts for this variation? The author argues that more flexibility is not always better: obtaining it and subsequently using it are both costly. Rather than maximize flexibility, states thus seek an optimal amount. If they have access to policy space through other means, such as currency devaluations and trade remedies, they will exercise restraint in seeking binding overhang. The same supply-side logic holds at the domestic level: governments strategically withhold binding overhang from industries that are able to rely on trade remedies, despite the fact that these tend to have the greatest political clout.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it