Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

...This paper examines the incidence of U.S. sugar duties using a unique set of high-frequency (weekly, and sometimes daily) data on the landed and the duty-inclusive price of raw sugar in New York City from 1890 to 1930, a time when the United States consumed more than 20 percent of world sugar production and was therefore plausibly a 'large' country. The results reveal a striking asymmetry: a tariff reduction is immediately passed through to consumer prices with no impact on the import price, whereas about 40 percent of a tariff increase is passed through to consumer prices and 60 percent borne by foreign exporters. The apparent explanation for the asymmetric response is the asymmetric response of demand: imports collapse upon a tariff increase, but do not surge after a tariff reduction.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w20635

[UC Berkeley Events Calendar: Seminar 211, 237, and 281, History, Macro, and International: Doug Irwin: Tariff Incidence: Evidence from US Sugar Duties, 1890-1930](http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/econ.html?event_ID=85003&date=2015-03-03&filter=Secondary Event Type&filtersel=1061)