Why are people still using the Sachs-Warner index in empirical work? It’s a dummy variable, and it’s not driven by the tariff and NTB components. Surely by now someone must have built and made readily available a cross-country data set that better describes trade policy. And if not, that’s a project worth pursuing, right?
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Trade Diversion 
You’d think so, but … I am a political scientist trying to do some political economy work on trade regime effects, and I was shocked to see that there are not good time seris bilateral tariff data anywhere. Definitely something that needs to be done.
We either try to measure actual policies (what Sachs-Warner tried to do) or we calculate and estimate policies. Both obviously have problems. In the latter camp, Hiscox & Kastner is probably the most interesting…