The tariffs imposed by President Trump as part of his trade war with China are mainly cutting into retailers’ profits rather than raising costs for consumers, according to a new study.
The finding, published in a paper circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday, runs counter to the narratives advanced by both critics and defenders of the tariffs. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the tariffs are a net gain for the United States because they are paid by the Chinese and result in additional Treasury Department revenue. Critics of Trump’s tariffs, especially in the business community, have argued that they amount to taxes on businesses and, especially, consumers, to whom the increased costs are usually passed along.
The study indicated that while businesses are being hurt, consumers haven’t felt much pain so far. It found that a 20% tariff on a product was associated with an increase of only about 1% in the product’s retail price. Those increases are not likely to have much impact on consumers, it noted.
“Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods,” the report concluded.
Co-author Brent Neiman, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said he was surprised that prices hadn’t risen further. “[O]ne possibility is that it simply takes a while for adjustment by retailers to occur, which is one reason why we emphasize that we may only have seen the economy’s short-run response to tariffs,” he told the Washington Examiner.
The other authors were International Monetary Fund chief economist Gita Gopinath, Harvard Business School economist Alberto Cavallo, and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston economist Jenny Tang.
Bryan Riley, trade policy expert for the National Taxpayers Union, said that U.S. retailers have avoided price increases through one-off maneuvers, such as increasing imports prior to the tariffs being imposed. “In addition, they may have been able to eat some of the cost for a limited time in the hopes that the tariffs will soon be lifted,” he said.
The paper, though, which has not yet undergone peer review, said that while tariffs may not have driven up prices yet, they likely would have that impact if they remain in place. “We speculate that if the tariffs remain in place for much longer, pressure on these retailers will likely rise,” the authors wrote. “We would expect this to result in some future combination of greater passthrough into consumer prices.”
