joint with George Alessandria, Shafaat Khan, Armen Khederlarian, and Joseph Steinberg.

We study, empirically and theoretically, the growth of Chinese imports into the United States from autarky in 1970 to about 15 percent of overall imports in 2008, taking advantage of the rich heterogeneity in trade policy and trade growth across products. Central to our analysis is an accounting for the dynamics of trade, trade policy, and trade policy expectations. We isolate the lagged effects of past reforms and the current effects of future expected trade policy. We estimate the short- and long-run trade elasticity for China and a time-varying path of expected trade policy. We find short-run trade elasticities of 2–3 and long-run trade elasticities of about 8, with only about one-quarter of the gap closed per year. We build a multi-industry, heterogeneous-firm model with a dynamic exporting decision and trade policy dynamics to estimate a path of trade policy. We find that being granted NTR rates in 1980 was largely a surprise and that in the early stages, this reform had a high probability of reversal. There was a large drop in the likelihood of a reversal in the mid 1980s and a relatively small change in the late 1990s, despite China’s application to the WTO. The timing of these reforms and the dynamics of trade suggest that past-reforms continued to be important drivers of trade growth in the lead-up to China’s WTO application. One sign that the risk of non-renewal was relatively low in the late 1990s is that only about 10–15 percent of the growth in trade in products with a gap in NNTR and NTR rates takes place from 1997 to 2007.

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