*Values capture what is important to an individual and can shape economic behaviors through attitudes and preferences. Yet, no attention has been paid to the fact that individuals hold a variety of values and that there may be costs when these are not consistent with each other. This paper examines how individuals reconcile their values, both over time and across different categories, when values are inter-dependent. I develop a model in which individuals adjust their values simultaneously when an experience occurs in their life, thus leading to spillover effects across values. Bringing the model to cohort data, I assess the impact of several life events---parenthood, sickness and unemployment---on values. The empirical results suggest that (i) values change over the lifecycle due to life events, (ii) values are linked to each other, and (iii) spillover effects do exist and are sizeable.

**The ongoing US-China trade war suggests that there exist some shortcomings of the WTO agreements which are mainly instrument-based. The import commitments made by China in the Phase One Deal have a flavor of an outcome-based agreement. In this paper, I revisit the instrumentbased trade agreement model of Horn, Maggi, and Staiger (2006), where contract incompleteness means that the optimal agreement may not lead to the first-best outcome. I extend the model to introduce an outcome-based agreement, namely import volume constraint. When governments face uncertainty about the state of the economy, I first show that state-contingent outcome-based agreements can replicate first-best instrument-based agreements if their contracting costs are the same. I second show that a non-contingent outcome-based agreement deals well with terms-of-trade manipulation and provides some flexibility to react to that uncertainty at the same time. Whether a non-contingent outcome-based contract is the optimal agreement jointly depends on government’s ability to manipulate terms of trade, the size and source of state uncertainty and its contracting cost.