Quantifying the impact of the US-China trade war on exports

This paper studies the response of US and Chinese exports to the 2018/19 tariff war. Using bilateral product-level trade data, we find very similar average trade elasticities for the two countries. Perhaps surprisingly, there was no reallocation of exports to other destinations. This resulted in a sizable fall of aggregate exports for both countries, estimated to be -0.8ppt for the US and -2.0ppt for China.