Illegal models

I have been been banned by the US Congress! Well, not quite, but one can always hope. I am coauthor of what I believe is the only economic model that has been banned in proposed legislation -- COMPAS. Many professional incarnations ago, I coauthored a set of rather simple calibrated trade models meant to help in the assessment of economic factors relevant in fair trade litigation and safeguard cases. The goal, naively, was to make the process more transparent vis-à-vis the winners and losers. Economic guidelines and indicators have been used for decades in antitrust litigation, and our intention was to introduce the same dose of scientific reason to trade litigation. Of course, this was before the surge in research on politics of trade policy, and before I had read Michael Finger's delightful JPE piece "Policy Research." Since trade litigation has less to do with scientific rationality and national interest than it does with lobbying by competing special interests (including efforts to obfuscate the impact on losers), the effort was not appreciated. Recently, it keeps surfacing in legislation. One example of the draft legislation is linked here (the proposed law) -- see pages 71 & 72. The current tone of proposed legislation is not really targeted at our simple models. Rather is it prohibit the Executive Branch from using economic analysis when formualting economic policy. Does this make sense? Of course it does. Just read Finger's article.

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