While increasing trade and foreign direct investment, international trade agreements create winners and losers. Our paper examines the distributional consequences of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) at the firm level. We contend that PTAs expand trade among the largest and most productive multinationals by lowering preferential tariffs. We examine data covering the near universe of US foreign direct investment and disaggregated tariff data from PTAs signed by the United States. Our results indicate that US preferential tariffs increase sales to the United States from the most competitive subsidiaries of multinational corporations operating in partner countries. We also find increases in market concentration in partner countries following preferential liberalization with the United States. By demonstrating that the gains from preferential liberalization are unevenly distributed across firms, we shed new light on the firm-level, economic sources of political mobilization over international trade and investment policies.

This paper explores the existence of partisan cycles in foreign direct investment performance. Our theoretical model predicts that the incumbent government's partisanship should affect foreign investors' decision to flow into different sectors of the host country: pro-labor governments would encourage the inflow of the type of investment that complements labor in production; pro-capital governments would promote the entry of investment that substitutes for labor. Empirical evidence from a sample of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries reveals a pattern of foreign investors' response to partisan cycles consistent with the predictions of the model. First, foreign investment systematically flows into different sectors of the host economy under left- and right-leaning incumbents. Second, we find a positive correlation between foreign investment and changes in average wages under left-leaning incumbents, but no effect on wages under right-leaning governments. Copyright 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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We explore the impact of issue framing on individual attitudes toward international trade+ Based on a survey experiment fielded in Argentina during 2007, which reproduces the setup of earlier studies in the United States, we show that individuals' position in the economy and their material concerns define the strength of their prior beliefs about international trade, and thereby mitigate their sensitivity to the new dimensions introduced in informational cues+ Extending the analysis beyond the United States to a country with different skill endowments allows us to better explore the role of material and nonmaterial attributes on individual attitudes toward trade+ We find that skill is a central predictor of support for openness+ The effect is strongest for individuals in the service sector and in cities that cater to the producers of agricultural commodities+ Our findings suggest that the pattern of support for economic integration reflects the predictions from recent literature in international economics that emphasizes trade's impact on the relative demand for skilled labor regardless of factor endowments+ Our findings also amend recent empirical contributions that suggest socialization is the main factor explaining individual sensitivity to issue framing on trade preferences+ We suggest that material conditions associated with income and price effects are crucial, both in shaping trade preferences and in affecting the malleability of attitudes to issue framing+ Hence, our results provide a crucial contribution to our general understanding of the attributes shaping susceptibility to political framing in policy debates+ Recent empirical work on the determinants of trade policy preferences based on the United States reveals that individuals' responses to survey questions are susceptible to framing effects, the strength of which usually covaries with respon-

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