The Employment Consequences of Anti-Dumping Tariffs: Lessons from Brazil

Abstract How do import tariffs affect employment? We develop an empirical strategy to identify the effects of tariffs using a difference-in-differences strategy, comparing antidumping (AD) investigations resulting in AD tariffs to those not resulting in AD tariffs. We find that an AD tariff decreases imports and increases employment in the protected sector. Moreover, employment in downstream firms decreases, while upstream firms are unaffected because the protected sector sources inputs abroad. Using a model to quantify the aggregate effects, we find that the Brazilian AD policy increased employment by 0.06% at a welfare loss of 2.4%.