The resort to protectionism during the great recession: Which factors mattered?

A dataset of state measures implemented between November 2008 and October 2010 that discriminate against foreign commercial interests is used to estimate the determinants of the resort to protectionism by governments during the Great Recession. A well known theory of protectionism is found to be systematically at odds with one important aspect of the data: the more protectionist measures a jurisdiction's government has implemented, the greater the theory under-predicts the amount of discrimination against foreign commercial interests. The extent to which this unexplained variation can be accounted for by other corporate and official factors are then examined