The current round of multilateral trade negotiations in the World Trade Organization seem to has stalled. Observers and researchers have noted that part of the reason is that the economic gains to be made from the current round of negotiations are relatively low after the previous eight rounds of GATT and WTO negotiations. But these claims are made based on economic gains from trade liberalization through their impact on import and export flows. In this project we move beyond pure economic gains to consider the gains that trade agreements could bring in the presence of credibility problems or uncertainty. The project includes three working papers. In the first paper we explored the credibility rationale for signing trade agreements. We found that governments that are relatively weak in terms of bargaining power when facing interest groups, and that give intermediary values to social welfare in their objective function are more likely to sign trade agreements for credibility reasons. These trade agreements are also more trade-creating than agreements that are signed for other reasons. In the second paper we explored the extent to which trade agreements help reduce trade policy volatility. We focus on agricultural trade policy because it is notoriously volatile. We found that trade agreements help reduce agricultural trade-policy volatility. We also found that the WTO’s agricultural agreement also contributed to reducing agricultural trade-policy volatility, in spite of the weak disciplines involved, but the effect is weak. Finally, in a third paper we examined the role played by GATT’s tariff binding in limiting the protectionist response during economic crisis. We found that tariff bounds today could allow in most countries, particularly in the developing world, for a very large protectionist response to economic crisis, but this flexibility allowed by the system has rarely been used.