The Cost of Standing Up to Protectionism: Price and Welfare Impacts of Canada's 2018 Retaliatory Tariffs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the United States imposed tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum in 2018, Canada responded with retaliatory tariffs on US goods worth $16.6 billion. I analyze how much of these tariffs passed through to import prices. The extent to which import prices increase because of tariffs is the tariff pass-through rate. A lower pass-through indicates that foreign exporters—rather than domestic importers—paid for most of the tariffs, implying better welfare consequences for the tariff-imposing country. Using Canadian import data and retaliation information, I exploit a triple-difference strategy to estimate the pass-through of Canada's retaliatory tariffs. On average, import prices increased to reflect the full tariffs, leading to zero terms-of-trade gains and welfare losses of $464 million. Thus, each dollar of the $1.76 billion tariff revenues raised imposed an average cost of $1.26 on Canadian importers. However, product-level analysis reveals that pass-through was incomplete for a subset of the targeted US products.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".