Protection forestall: Offshore firms against tariffs in their own industry

Abstract Firms that offshore final production should oppose trade barriers “protecting” their own industry. This pits them against onshore firms, especially when comparative disadvantage is most pronounced, and so fundamentally alters trade policy coalitions. The US-China trade war's exclusion process, where US firms could request that tariffs not be applied to a product, provides a golden opportunity to test this contention. We show that coverage by a tariff in the trade war and firm characteristics associated with offshoring—size, multinationality, and heavy imports from China—interacted to generate firm requests for exclusion from the trade war's tariffs. This finding is robust to input-sourcing and fears of export retaliation as alternative explanations, and across multiple measures of firm size, tariff coverage, and exclusion requests. We therefore test a key piece of the firm-centered model of trade politics and show its value in interpreting the US-China trade war.