Erica York summarizes research on tariffs

From her Twitter account.

"We can also look at the studies the White House chose not to cite:

An April 2019 University of Chicago study conducted by Aaron Flaaen, Ali Hortacsu, and Felix Tintelnot found that after the Trump administration imposed tariffs on washing machines, washer prices increased by $86 per unit and dryer prices increased by $92 per unit, due to package deals, ultimately resulting in an aggregate increase in consumer costs of over $1.5 billion.

An October 2019 study by Alberto Cavallo and coauthors found tariffs on imports from China were almost fully passed through to US import prices but only partially to retail consumers, implying some businesses absorbed the higher tariffs, reducing retail margins, instead of passing them on to retail consumers.

In December 2019 (study updated in August 2024), Federal Reserve economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce found a net decrease in manufacturing employment due to the tariffs, suggesting that the benefit of increased production in protected industries was outweighed by the consequences of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs.

A February 2020 paper from economists Kyle Handley, Fariha Kamal, and Ryan Monarch estimated the 2018–2019 import tariffs were equivalent to a 2 percent tariff on all US exports.

A December 2021 review of the data and methods used to estimate the trade war effects through 2021, by Pablo Fajgelbaum and Amit Khandelwal, concluded that “US consumers of imported goods have borne the brunt of the tariffs through higher prices, and that the trade war has lowered aggregate real income in both the US and China, although not by large magnitudes relative to GDP.”

A January 2022 study from the US Department of Agriculture estimated the direct export losses from the retaliatory tariffs totaled $27 billion from 2018 through the end of 2019.

A January 2024 study by David Autor and others concludes that the 2018–2019 tariffs failed to provide economic help to the heartland: import tariffs had “neither a sizable nor significant effect on US employment in regions with newly‐​protected sectors” and foreign retaliation “by contrast had clear negative employment impacts, particularly in agriculture.”

A NY Fed January 2025 study "We find that a fall in a firm’s stock prices on tariff-announcement days is associated with a significant decline in firm performance between 2019 and 2021. In particular, a one-standard-deviation fall in a firm’s stock prices (a 0.56 percent fall in market value) is associated with a fall of 12.9 percent in profits, 3.9 percent in employment, 6.7 percent in sales, and 2.2 percent in productivity.""