Krzysztof J Pelc
Biographic Data
| ID | 1087040 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Krzysztof J Pelc |
| GIVEN NAMES | Krzysztof J |
| FAMILY NAME | Pelc |
| SIGNATURE | PELC K J |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8122-0539 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 391 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Buy-in for Buyouts: Attitudes Toward Compensation for Reform
Political reforms are often blocked by concentrated interest groups. An overlooked response is to “buy out” such groups, offering compensation in return for pushing through reforms. We present the theoretical case for and against buyouts and test public support through survey experiments on three policy proposals: phasing out coal energy, simplifying tax filing, and granting dictators amnesty. Buyouts gain majority support, but this depends on pa…
“Human authored”? Who knows: On writing in the age of LLMs
Geography of Grievance: Industrial Hubs Magnify Political Discontent
Why do some economic shocks have political consequences, upturning elections and ushering in radical candidates, while others are brushed off as structural change? We address this puzzle by looking to geographically concentrated industries, and how they relate to regional identity. While most often presented as a source of regional strength, we show that industrial hubs in the United States have accounted for more job losses than gains over the l…
Backward-Looking Reparations Versus Forward-Looking Buyouts: Distributive Justice Across Time in International Law
Reparations aim to rectify historical harms by compensating victims, or their descendants. Even when such harms have a transnational aspect, as with the case for climate change reparations, they often stem from entrenched domestic political stalemates. In a common pattern, vested interest groups oppose reforms that, although supported by majorities and beneficial to society as a whole, threaten their own material interest. Such groups hold a mobi…
On Paying Workers to Stop Working: Public Attitudes toward “Wage Buyouts”
In an effort to manage carbon emissions, nitrogen runoffs, and other externalities, governments are increasingly resorting to a drastic policy measure: paying workers to stop working. Though such initiatives may be, strictly speaking, welfare enhancing, they are increasingly politicized, and often meet with protests. What explains public attitudes to “wage buyouts”? This article compares the explanatory power of two ideal-type theories in derivin…
The source of economic shocks matters for their political outcomes
Do different economic shocks favor different types of political leadership? Using a survey experiment conducted on 3500 American respondents, we offer causal evidence for an unexpected relation between different types of economic shocks and a demand for a radical political response. First, we show that individuals believe politicians have a role in preventing layoffs due to both offshoring and automation, compared to run-of-the-mill bankruptcies.…
Are WTO Rulings Biased? The Role of Institutional Design in Protecting Judicial Autonomy
The dispute settlement system of the World Trade Organization (wto) prides itself on its high degree of judicial independence and the impartiality of its adjudicators. Yet compared to other international tribunals, wto member states exert considerable political control over wto adjudicators. Contestation over the appointment of those adjudicators also reflects governments’ awareness that nationality may matter for outcomes. The authors ask whethe…
Can informal judicial norms protect against political pressure
International tribunals are pulled between a commitment to judicial autonomy and the need to manage their members’ political expectations, lest these rein in the tribunal’s power. We argue that when the formal design of international institutions leaves them exposed to political control, institutional actors can respond by self-imposing constraints to protect themselves from excessive oversight. We examine this phenomenon in the context of the Wo…
Taking One for the (Other) Team: Does Political Diversity Lower Vaccination Uptake
What implications might rising animosity towards political out-partisans have for public health? Vaccination has a significant social aspect, protecting not only the vaccinated, but also those around them. While political ideology in the United States was an important driver of individuals’ willingness to get vaccinated against COVID-19, with those on the political right displaying greater hesitancy, we examine the role that political diversity h…
Does Political Diversity Inhibit Blood Donations
Does political diversity affect the prevalence of selfless behavior across a society? According to a recurrent finding from the study of social capital, ethnic diversity reduces prosocial behavior. We ask whether the same applies to partisan identity, by turning to a frequently used proxy for social capital: blood donations. The question is especially timely: the United States is currently experiencing its worst blood shortage in over a decade. U…
WTO Rulings and the Veil of Anonymity
Despite a general push for greater transparency, opacity continues to play an important function in international tribunals. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a case in point. While it has done much to increase its openness, the very design of its dispute settlement body is premised on anonymity in some essential respects. We examine two such instances, each dealing with the authorship of dispute rulings. First, we use text analysis tools to …
Who Guards the “Guardians of the System”? The Role of the Secretariat in WTO Dispute Settlement
For all the attention paid to the panelists and Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Secretariat plays an overlooked and increasingly important role in the dispute settlement mechanism (DSM), including in selecting panelists, writing “issue papers” for adjudicators, providing economic expert advice, participating in internal deliberations, and drafting actual rulings. This Article argues that, given these functions, the DSM i…
Do Investor–State Disputes (Still) Harm FDI
What are the consequences of being sued for violating bilateral investment treaties? The conventional wisdom is that investor–state disputes (ISDS) tarnish countries' compliance records, and harm foreign direct investment in the process. This article re-examines this belief in light of recent trends in ISDS. The regime has witnessed a proliferation of claims, a growing proportion of which allege breaches of provisions like fair and equitable trea…
How responsive is Trade Adjustment Assistance
How responsive is the US’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) to the labor dislocation that results from trade integration? Recent findings suggest that the world's most ambitious trade adjustment program barely responds to import shocks, and that the shortfall is made up by disability insurance and early retirement. This holds considerable implications: TAA offers a lens onto the central question of whether developed democracies can effectively re…
Trade Competition and Worker Compensation: Why Do Some Receive More than Others
Dealing with the distributional consequences of trade liberalization has become one of the key challenges facing developed democracies. Governments have created compensation programs to ease labor market adjustment, but these resources tend to be distributed highly unevenly. What accounts for the variation? Looking at the largest trade adjustment program in existence, the US’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), we argue that petitions for compensa…
The Politics of Trade Adjustment Versus Trade Protection
The United States’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program seeks to help workers transition away from jobs lost to import competition. By contrast, trade remedies like antidumping seek to directly reduce the effect of competition at the border. Though they have very different economic effects, we show that trade adjustment and protectionism act as substitutes. Using the first geo-coded measure of US trade protectionist demands, we show that con…
Can Covid-Era Export Restrictions Be Deterred
The COVID-19 pandemic has led some 75 countries to restrict their exports of hundreds of essential products, ranging from antibiotics and face masks to medical ventilators. Since banning exports decreases global supply and leads to price surges on world markets, the cost of these measures may ultimately be counted in human lives
How a Retreat from Global Economic Governance May Empower Business Interests
After decades of broad, bipartisan support for global economic integration, US politics has been shaken by a backlash against global economic governance. The promise of internationally derived gains no longer suffices to smooth over domestic distributional consequences. The Trump administration has turned inward, shunning multilateral governance and raising the following question: If the US and other protectionist governments step back from globa…
The Causes and Effects of Leaks in International Negotiations
International negotiations are founded on secrecy. Yet, unauthorized leaks of negotiating documents have grown common. What are the incentives behind leaks, and what are their effects on bargaining between states? Specifically, are leaks offensive or defensive: are they intended to spur parties to make more ambitious commitments, or are they more often intended to claw back commitments made? We examine these questions in the context of trade nego…
Words Matter: How WTO Rulings Handle Controversy
The rulings of internationals courts are often reduced to “who won?,” but much more is at stake. Like other institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO) offers rulings that balance legal discipline against political constraints. We argue that one way in which the WTO handles politically sensitive issues is by increasing the amount of affect in their rulings. In doing so, judges provide national governments with discursive resources to persuad…
Free Riding on Enforcement in the World Trade Organization
Many policies that appear to violate WTO rules remain unchallenged, even as they have a significant economic impact. Why is this? We argue that the likelihood that a country challenges a protectionist policy is linked to how concentrated or diffuse that policy is. When it is concentrated, litigation is a private good. But when a policy is diffuse, affecting many states, litigation is a public good and countries face a collective action problem: e…
When Can Multiple Imputation Improve Regression Estimates
Multiple imputation (MI) is often presented as an improvement over listwise deletion (LWD) for regression estimation in the presence of missing data. Against a common view, we demonstrate anew that the complete case estimator can be unbiased, even if data are not missing completely at random. As long as the analyst can control for the determinants of missingness, MI offers no benefit over LWD for bias reduction in regression analysis. We highligh…
Cooperation in Hard Times: Self-restraint of Trade Protection
Hard times give rise to greater demand for protection. International trade rules include provisions that allow for raising barriers to aid industries when they suffer economic injury. Yet widespread use of flexibility measures may undermine the trade system and worsen economic conditions. How do states balance these conflicting pressures? This article assesses the effect of crises on cooperation in trade. We hypothesize that governments impose le…
What Explains the Low Success Rate of Investor-State Disputes
The treatment of foreign investment has become the most controversial issue in global governance. At the center of the controversy lies the mechanism of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which allows private firms legal recourse against governments if government interference has degraded their investment. Using newly released data covering 742 investment disputes, I assess some of the central claims about ISDS. I argue that the regime has…
Making and Bending International Rules: The Design of Exceptions and Escape Clauses in Trade Law
All treaties, from human rights to international trade, include formal exceptions that allow governments to legally break the rules that they have committed to, in order to deal with unexpected events. Such institutional 'flexibility' is necessary, yet it raises a tricky theoretical question: how to allow for this necessary flexibility, while preventing its abuse? Krzysztof Pelc examines how designers of rules in vastly different settings come up…
What Explains the Low Success Rate of Investor-State Disputes
The treatment of foreign investment has become the most controversial issue in global governance. At the center of the controversy lies the mechanism of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which allows private firms legal recourse against governments if government interference has degraded their investment. Using newly released data covering 742 investment disputes, I assess some of the central claims about ISDS. I argue that the regime has…
Seeking Escape: The Use of Escape Clauses in International Trade Agreements
In agreements that include flexibility enhancing mechanisms such as escape clauses, how do institutions realize the benefits of flexibility while preventing its abuse? The conventional wisdom is that escape clauses must be made costly, but I show this claim to be at odds with empirical observation. In the GATT/WTO, the institution where escape clauses are most prevalent, compensation following escape was only widespread in the 1950s. Since then, …
The Politics of Judicial Economy at the World Trade Organization
International institutions often moderate the legal decisions they render. World Trade Organization (WTO) panels do this by exercising judicial economy. This practice, which is evident in 41 percent of all rulings, involves the decision not to rule on some of the litigants' arguments. The constraint is that it can be appealed. We argue that panels exercise judicial economy when the wider membership is ambivalent about the future consequences of a…
Googling the WTO: What Search-Engine Data Tell Us About the Political Economy of Institutions
How does international law affect state behavior? Existing models addressing this issue rest on individual preferences and voter behavior, yet these assumptions are rarely questioned. Do citizens truly react to their governments being taken to court over purported violations? I propose a novel approach to test the premise behind models of international treaty-making, using web-search data. Such data are widely used in epidemiology; in this articl…
The Politics of Precedent in International Law: A Social Network Application
The concept of precedent is fundamental to domestic courts, especially in Anglo-American common law systems, where judges are bound to the court's past decisions. By contrast, precedent has no formal authority in international law. Legal scholars point to Article 59 of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Statute in this respect, according to which international legal rulings are binding only on the parties in the dispute at hand, and have no…
Why Do Some Countries Get Better WTO Accession Terms Than Others
The process by which countries accede to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has become the subject of considerable debate. This article takes a closer look at what determines the concessions the institution requires of an entrant. In other words, who gets a good deal, and who does not? I argue that given the institutional design of accession proceedings and the resulting suspension of reciprocity, accession terms are driven by the domestic export…
Measuring the Cost of Privacy: A Look at the Distributional Effects of Private Bargaining
Transparency is one of the most contested aspects of international organizations. While observers frequently call for greater oversight of policy making, evidence suggests that settlement between states is more likely when negotiations are conducted behind closed doors. The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) legal body provides a useful illustration of these competing perspectives. As in many courts, WTO dispute settlement is designed explicitly to…
Who Gets to Be In the Room? Manipulating Participation in WTO Disputes
Third parties complicate World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement by adding voices and issues to a dispute. However, complainants can limit third parties by filing cases under Article XXIII of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), rather than Article XXII. We argue that third parties create “insurance” by lowering the benefit of winning and the cost of losing a dispute. We construct a formal model in which third parties make…
When Can Multiple Imputation Improve Regression Estimates
Multiple imputation (MI) is often presented as an improvement over listwise deletion (LWD) for regression estimation in the presence of missing data. Against a common view, we demonstrate anew that the complete case estimator can be unbiased, even if data are not missing completely at random. As long as the analyst can control for the determinants of missingness, MI offers no benefit over LWD for bias reduction in regression analysis. We highligh…
Constraining Coercion? Legitimacy and Its Role in U.S. Trade Policy, 1975–2000
The role of legitimacy in international relations is a topic of much debate, yet there is little understanding of the mechanism behind it. Here I address this discrepancy by asking: are state threats perceived as (il)legitimate more or less likely to be successful? By operationalizing illegitimacy as unilateral action in the presence of a multilateral option, I consider the variation in the success of U.S. trade measures from 1975 to 2000. As I s…
Fear of Crowds in World Trade Organization Disputes: Why Don’t More Countries Participate
The participation deficit in global governance is usually blamed on power politics; we argue it may actually reflect strategic behavior by excluded countries themselves. In the World Trade Organization, member-states affected by a trade dispute can join litigation as "third parties" to gain access to otherwise private negotiations. In spite of its considerable benefit and negligible cost, third-party participation remains rare. Countries often st…
Words Matter: How WTO Rulings Handle Controversy
The rulings of internationals courts are often reduced to “who won?,” but much more is at stake. Like other institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO) offers rulings that balance legal discipline against political constraints. We argue that one way in which the WTO handles politically sensitive issues is by increasing the amount of affect in their rulings. In doing so, judges provide national governments with discursive resources to persuad…
Do WTO Disputes Actually Increase Trade
Exporters, trade lawyers, policy makers, and academics see the WTO's Dispute Settlement Understanding as an important, though costly, venue for facilitating the removal of harmful barriers to trade. If this conventional wisdom holds, then disputes should increase trade. We provide a careful analysis of trade flows in the wake of WTO disputes. We find that WTO disputes do not increase the respondent country's imports of the products at issue. Inst…
The Politics of Trade Adjustment Versus Trade Protection
The United States’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program seeks to help workers transition away from jobs lost to import competition. By contrast, trade remedies like antidumping seek to directly reduce the effect of competition at the border. Though they have very different economic effects, we show that trade adjustment and protectionism act as substitutes. Using the first geo-coded measure of US trade protectionist demands, we show that con…
How a Retreat from Global Economic Governance May Empower Business Interests
After decades of broad, bipartisan support for global economic integration, US politics has been shaken by a backlash against global economic governance. The promise of internationally derived gains no longer suffices to smooth over domestic distributional consequences. The Trump administration has turned inward, shunning multilateral governance and raising the following question: If the US and other protectionist governments step back from globa…
How States Ration Flexibility: Tariffs, Remedies, and Exchange Rates as Policy Substitutes
A close look at the commitments of World Trade Organization (WTO) members presents a striking paradox. Most states could raise their duties significantly before falling afoul of their WTO obligations. Moreover, such “binding overhang” varies between countries: some could more than double the amount of trade protection they offer overnight, whereas others are tightly constrained. What accounts for this variation? The author argues that more flexib…
Do Investor–State Disputes (Still) Harm FDI
What are the consequences of being sued for violating bilateral investment treaties? The conventional wisdom is that investor–state disputes (ISDS) tarnish countries' compliance records, and harm foreign direct investment in the process. This article re-examines this belief in light of recent trends in ISDS. The regime has witnessed a proliferation of claims, a growing proportion of which allege breaches of provisions like fair and equitable trea…
How responsive is Trade Adjustment Assistance
How responsive is the US’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) to the labor dislocation that results from trade integration? Recent findings suggest that the world's most ambitious trade adjustment program barely responds to import shocks, and that the shortfall is made up by disability insurance and early retirement. This holds considerable implications: TAA offers a lens onto the central question of whether developed democracies can effectively re…
The Causes and Effects of Leaks in International Negotiations
International negotiations are founded on secrecy. Yet, unauthorized leaks of negotiating documents have grown common. What are the incentives behind leaks, and what are their effects on bargaining between states? Specifically, are leaks offensive or defensive: are they intended to spur parties to make more ambitious commitments, or are they more often intended to claw back commitments made? We examine these questions in the context of trade nego…
Cooperation in Hard Times: Self-restraint of Trade Protection
Hard times give rise to greater demand for protection. International trade rules include provisions that allow for raising barriers to aid industries when they suffer economic injury. Yet widespread use of flexibility measures may undermine the trade system and worsen economic conditions. How do states balance these conflicting pressures? This article assesses the effect of crises on cooperation in trade. We hypothesize that governments impose le…
Free Riding on Enforcement in the World Trade Organization
Many policies that appear to violate WTO rules remain unchallenged, even as they have a significant economic impact. Why is this? We argue that the likelihood that a country challenges a protectionist policy is linked to how concentrated or diffuse that policy is. When it is concentrated, litigation is a private good. But when a policy is diffuse, affecting many states, litigation is a public good and countries face a collective action problem: e…
Trade Competition and Worker Compensation: Why Do Some Receive More than Others
Dealing with the distributional consequences of trade liberalization has become one of the key challenges facing developed democracies. Governments have created compensation programs to ease labor market adjustment, but these resources tend to be distributed highly unevenly. What accounts for the variation? Looking at the largest trade adjustment program in existence, the US’ Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), we argue that petitions for compensa…
Do International Rulings have Spillover Effects: The View from Financial Markets
How influential are international courts? Can their rulings reach beyond a given case and affect the behavior of countries not party to the dispute? International law is clear on the matter: rulings have no formal authority beyond the case at hand. This tenet is consistent with the incentives of sovereign states wary of delegating too much authority to courts. By contrast, the authors claim that even in the absence of formal authority, the ruling…
The Cost of Wiggle-Room: Looking at the Welfare Effects of Flexibility in Tariff Rates at the WTO1
There is considerable variation in the depth of countries' commitments at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While WTO members apply tariffs on imports at roughly comparable levels, the maximum levels allowed on these tariffs vary dramatically, leaving some members with far more flexibility to raise trade barriers overnight. Some countries have argued that such "binding overhang" is harmless unless it is exploited, while other countries disagree…
The source of economic shocks matters for their political outcomes
Do different economic shocks favor different types of political leadership? Using a survey experiment conducted on 3500 American respondents, we offer causal evidence for an unexpected relation between different types of economic shocks and a demand for a radical political response. First, we show that individuals believe politicians have a role in preventing layoffs due to both offshoring and automation, compared to run-of-the-mill bankruptcies.…
Same Game, New Tricks: What Makes a Good Strategy in the Prisoner’s Dilemma
The aim of this article is to distinguish between strategies in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma on the basis of their relative performance in a given population set. We first define a natural order on such strategies that disregards isolated disturbances, by using the limit of time-average payoffs. This order allows us to consider one strategy as strictly better than another in some population of strategies. We then determine a strategy σ to be ‘…
Seeking Escape: The Use of Escape Clauses in International Trade Agreements
In agreements that include flexibility enhancing mechanisms such as escape clauses, how do institutions realize the benefits of flexibility while preventing its abuse? The conventional wisdom is that escape clauses must be made costly, but I show this claim to be at odds with empirical observation. In the GATT/WTO, the institution where escape clauses are most prevalent, compensation following escape was only widespread in the 1950s. Since then, …
Constraining Coercion? Legitimacy and Its Role in U.S. Trade Policy, 1975–2000
The role of legitimacy in international relations is a topic of much debate, yet there is little understanding of the mechanism behind it. Here I address this discrepancy by asking: are state threats perceived as (il)legitimate more or less likely to be successful? By operationalizing illegitimacy as unilateral action in the presence of a multilateral option, I consider the variation in the success of U.S. trade measures from 1975 to 2000. As I s…
The Politics of Judicial Economy at the World Trade Organization
International institutions often moderate the legal decisions they render. World Trade Organization (WTO) panels do this by exercising judicial economy. This practice, which is evident in 41 percent of all rulings, involves the decision not to rule on some of the litigants' arguments. The constraint is that it can be appealed. We argue that panels exercise judicial economy when the wider membership is ambivalent about the future consequences of a…
How States Ration Flexibility: Tariffs, Remedies, and Exchange Rates as Policy Substitutes
A close look at the commitments of World Trade Organization (WTO) members presents a striking paradox. Most states could raise their duties significantly before falling afoul of their WTO obligations. Moreover, such “binding overhang” varies between countries: some could more than double the amount of trade protection they offer overnight, whereas others are tightly constrained. What accounts for this variation? The author argues that more flexib…
Why Do Some Countries Get Better WTO Accession Terms Than Others
The process by which countries accede to the World Trade Organization (WTO) has become the subject of considerable debate. This article takes a closer look at what determines the concessions the institution requires of an entrant. In other words, who gets a good deal, and who does not? I argue that given the institutional design of accession proceedings and the resulting suspension of reciprocity, accession terms are driven by the domestic export…
The Cost of Wiggle-Room: Looking at the Welfare Effects of Flexibility in Tariff Rates at the WTO1
There is considerable variation in the depth of countries' commitments at the World Trade Organization (WTO). While WTO members apply tariffs on imports at roughly comparable levels, the maximum levels allowed on these tariffs vary dramatically, leaving some members with far more flexibility to raise trade barriers overnight. Some countries have argued that such "binding overhang" is harmless unless it is exploited, while other countries disagree…
Googling the WTO: What Search-Engine Data Tell Us About the Political Economy of Institutions
How does international law affect state behavior? Existing models addressing this issue rest on individual preferences and voter behavior, yet these assumptions are rarely questioned. Do citizens truly react to their governments being taken to court over purported violations? I propose a novel approach to test the premise behind models of international treaty-making, using web-search data. Such data are widely used in epidemiology; in this articl…
Who Gets to Be In the Room? Manipulating Participation in WTO Disputes
Third parties complicate World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement by adding voices and issues to a dispute. However, complainants can limit third parties by filing cases under Article XXIII of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), rather than Article XXII. We argue that third parties create “insurance” by lowering the benefit of winning and the cost of losing a dispute. We construct a formal model in which third parties make…
The Politics of Precedent in International Law: A Social Network Application
The concept of precedent is fundamental to domestic courts, especially in Anglo-American common law systems, where judges are bound to the court's past decisions. By contrast, precedent has no formal authority in international law. Legal scholars point to Article 59 of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Statute in this respect, according to which international legal rulings are binding only on the parties in the dispute at hand, and have no…
World Trade Organization and Judicial Enforcement of International Trade Law
The Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international court of unprecedented ambition. This essay examines why countries agreed to delegate as much power as they did to this international legal body, by looking to the rise of US unilateralism during the 1970s. I then offer an overview of the DSU's functioning, which concludes that its effectiveness derives more from the way it forces countries to neg…
Making and Bending International Rules: The Design of Exceptions and Escape Clauses in Trade Law
All treaties, from human rights to international trade, include formal exceptions that allow governments to legally break the rules that they have committed to, in order to deal with unexpected events. Such institutional 'flexibility' is necessary, yet it raises a tricky theoretical question: how to allow for this necessary flexibility, while preventing its abuse? Krzysztof Pelc examines how designers of rules in vastly different settings come up…
Making and Bending International Rules: The Design of Exceptions and Escape Clauses in Trade Law
All treaties, from human rights to international trade, include formal exceptions that allow governments to legally break the rules that they have committed to, in order to deal with unexpected events. Such institutional "flexibility" is necessary, yet it raises a tricky theoretical question: how to allow for this necessary flexibility, while preventing its abuse? Krzysztof Pelc examines how designers of rules in vastly different settings come up…
Do International Rulings have Spillover Effects: The View from Financial Markets
How influential are international courts? Can their rulings reach beyond a given case and affect the behavior of countries not party to the dispute? International law is clear on the matter: rulings have no formal authority beyond the case at hand. This tenet is consistent with the incentives of sovereign states wary of delegating too much authority to courts. By contrast, the authors claim that even in the absence of formal authority, the ruling…
Fear of Crowds in World Trade Organization Disputes: Why Don’t More Countries Participate
The participation deficit in global governance is usually blamed on power politics; we argue it may actually reflect strategic behavior by excluded countries themselves. In the World Trade Organization, member-states affected by a trade dispute can join litigation as "third parties" to gain access to otherwise private negotiations. In spite of its considerable benefit and negligible cost, third-party participation remains rare. Countries often st…
Do WTO Disputes Actually Increase Trade
Exporters, trade lawyers, policy makers, and academics see the WTO's Dispute Settlement Understanding as an important, though costly, venue for facilitating the removal of harmful barriers to trade. If this conventional wisdom holds, then disputes should increase trade. We provide a careful analysis of trade flows in the wake of WTO disputes. We find that WTO disputes do not increase the respondent country's imports of the products at issue. Inst…
Over‐commitment and backsliding in international trade
International commitments pay’ could be the mantra of the current literature on international organisations: tying their hands at the international level is a means for governments to push through politically costly, but ultimately welfare‐enhancing reforms. It is argued in this article that this logic has a limit, which can be empirically observed. Past a given point, further depth of integration increases odds of backsliding. This belief is tes…
Measuring the Cost of Privacy: A Look at the Distributional Effects of Private Bargaining
Transparency is one of the most contested aspects of international organizations. While observers frequently call for greater oversight of policy making, evidence suggests that settlement between states is more likely when negotiations are conducted behind closed doors. The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) legal body provides a useful illustration of these competing perspectives. As in many courts, WTO dispute settlement is designed explicitly to…
Cooperation in Hard Times: Self-restraint of Trade Protection
Hard times give rise to greater demand for protection. International trade rules include provisions that allow for raising barriers to aid industries when they suffer economic injury. Yet widespread use of flexibility measures may undermine the trade system and worsen economic conditions. How do states balance these conflicting pressures? This article assesses the effect of crises on cooperation in trade. We hypothesize that governments impose le…
What Explains the Low Success Rate of Investor-State Disputes
The treatment of foreign investment has become the most controversial issue in global governance. At the center of the controversy lies the mechanism of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), which allows private firms legal recourse against governments if government interference has degraded their investment. Using newly released data covering 742 investment disputes, I assess some of the central claims about ISDS. I argue that the regime has…
Free Riding on Enforcement in the World Trade Organization
Many policies that appear to violate WTO rules remain unchallenged, even as they have a significant economic impact. Why is this? We argue that the likelihood that a country challenges a protectionist policy is linked to how concentrated or diffuse that policy is. When it is concentrated, litigation is a private good. But when a policy is diffuse, affecting many states, litigation is a public good and countries face a collective action problem: e…
When Can Multiple Imputation Improve Regression Estimates
Multiple imputation (MI) is often presented as an improvement over listwise deletion (LWD) for regression estimation in the presence of missing data. Against a common view, we demonstrate anew that the complete case estimator can be unbiased, even if data are not missing completely at random. As long as the analyst can control for the determinants of missingness, MI offers no benefit over LWD for bias reduction in regression analysis. We highligh…
How a Retreat from Global Economic Governance May Empower Business Interests
After decades of broad, bipartisan support for global economic integration, US politics has been shaken by a backlash against global economic governance. The promise of internationally derived gains no longer suffices to smooth over domestic distributional consequences. The Trump administration has turned inward, shunning multilateral governance and raising the following question: If the US and other protectionist governments step back from globa…
The Causes and Effects of Leaks in International Negotiations
International negotiations are founded on secrecy. Yet, unauthorized leaks of negotiating documents have grown common. What are the incentives behind leaks, and what are their effects on bargaining between states? Specifically, are leaks offensive or defensive: are they intended to spur parties to make more ambitious commitments, or are they more often intended to claw back commitments made? We examine these questions in the context of trade nego…
Words Matter: How WTO Rulings Handle Controversy
The rulings of internationals courts are often reduced to “who won?,” but much more is at stake. Like other institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO) offers rulings that balance legal discipline against political constraints. We argue that one way in which the WTO handles politically sensitive issues is by increasing the amount of affect in their rulings. In doing so, judges provide national governments with discursive resources to persuad…
Political science (30 works) · Economics (29 works) · Law (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Business (21 works) · World Trade Organization Law (20 works) · Global trade and economics (19 works) · International trade (19 works) · Politics (18 works) · International Arbitration and Investment Law (16 works)