Well, lucky for us we've seen multiple, broader tariff studies, all concurring in their conclusions:

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34620

https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/americas-own-goal-w...

This one has even more egregious findings:

> Pass-through at the border is incomplete, yet consumers paid more than the tariff revenue collected.

Wonder how many other industries used tariffs as an excuse to further juice their profits. (Edit - turns out this study is looking at pre-2021 data, so we don't even know what they've done this time!)

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kjshsh123 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This doesn't increase their profits because, consistent with economics, increasing prices reduces quantity. Profit depends on the amount you sell, not just the price.

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keeda 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's true in absolute numbers (sales volume goes down), but in terms of margins (profit / sale) they're still doing better than they should have. As the study in TFA implies, if the consumers paid more than the tariffs were collected, the retailer in the middle must have pocketed the difference.

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kjshsh123 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, that's not what is happening. From the paper:

>The reason is that markups along the chain of intermediation between importer and consumer can scale up the percent pass-through in tariff costs, cumulating over distribution stages and resulting in a direct dollar impact on prices to be greater than tariffs paid, even though the percent change in consumer price is less than the tariff ad-valorem rate.

The retailer is paying more for its stock. Everyone loses despite higher prices.

	▲	keeda 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ah I see, I had misunderstood, the discrepancy in tariff revenue and what the consumer pays is due to the markups at each stage of distribution successively absorbing minor portions of the price increase until the consumer bears most of it. Took me a while to get my head around the numbers, but makes sense now, thanks for the correction!

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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