Protection for sale with imperfect rent capturing

Grossman and Helpman (1994) explain tariffs as the outcome of a lobbying process. In most empirical implementations of this framework protection is instead measured using non‐tariff barriers. Since tariffs allow the government to fully capture the rents from protection, while non‐tariff barriers do not, the existing parameter estimates of the protection for sale model are likely to be biased. To address this problem, we augment the framework by considering instruments that allow partial capturing. Our specification is supported by the data, where we find that only 72–75% of the rent from protection is appropriated by the government.