Hello,

I am new to this forum and econometrics in general so im not sure this is a appropriate line of questioning in this forum. I am constructing a dataset to use in Stata/SE 15, where my aim is to look at the effect of tariffs on U.S. manufactuing sector.

I am using the aggregation created by Li (2018), found here: https://www.card.iastate.edu/china/trade-war-data/ (point C). The data is allready aggregated to GTAP commodity level with corresponding trade values as weights. My goal is to further use this data to create two monthly variabels.

What I did was:
1. remove GTAP commodites not related to manufacturing, e.g. remove all GTAP sectors except 27-47 (https://www.gtap.agecon.purdue.edu/d...iledsector.asp). This was done using VLOOKUP in excel. Then I summed all the tariff increases and divided on number of rows. From this I got two variabels: 1) tariff increase that the U.S. put on import from the rest of the world and 2) tariff that is placed on exports coming from the US.

When I ran these against my dependent variable (production) in Stata I got that the "export tariff" has a positive effect, which sounds unlikely. I tried just summing the tariffincreases without dividing by number of rows (since they are already weighted) without any luck.

Does anyone have a way to use the data found on CARD to create monthly independent variables for tariff increases.

Would appreciate any help and thank you in advance.

PS: I am studying on a bachelor level, not yet very advanced in Stata so the regression I will use is very basic. Therefore a model like used in the reasearch paper here "Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector" by Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce will be out of reach.