This paper studies the political influence of individual firms on congressional decisions to suspend tariffs on U.S. imports of intermediate goods. We develop a legislative bargaining model in which firms influence legislators by transmitting information about the value of protection, using verbal messages and lobbying expenditures. Model estimation using firmlevel data on tariff suspension bills and lobbying expenditures reveals that the probability a suspension is granted decreases with each additional firm that expresses opposition. This effect is significantly larger than that of either opponent or proponent lobbying due to the greater information content of verbal opposition and legislative bargaining costs.

This paper analyzes welfare-state determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants—within and across countries—and their interaction with labor market drivers of preferences. We consider two mechanisms through which a redistributive welfare system might adjust as a result of immigration. Under the first model, immigration has a larger impact on high-income individuals, while under the second one low-income individuals are those most affected. Individual attitudes are consistent with the first welfare-state model and with labor market determinants. In countries where immigration is unskilled, income is negatively correlated with pro-immigration preferences, while skill is positively correlated with them. These relationships are reversed in economies characterized by skilled migration.

This paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants, within and across countries. The two survey data sets used, covering a wide range of developed and developing countries, make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country-level attributes. In particular, theory predicts that the correlation between pro-immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country. Skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise. Results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions. Noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes, but they don't alter significantly the labor-market results.