Randall W Stone
Biographic Data
| ID | 3596187 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Randall W Stone |
| GIVEN NAMES | Randall W |
| FAMILY NAME | Stone |
| SIGNATURE | STONE R W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Rochester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2453-8708 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 564 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Probabilistic Democracy
Democracy is an important concept that is difficult to measure, and existing measures have well-known weaknesses. We define democracy narrowly, as electoral accountability, and estimate the probability of democracy using a structural model and data from 1945 to 2008. We allow for strategic voting and find evidence that voters are intimidated into supporting authoritarian leaders. Ratification of the Convention Against Torture by the country in qu…
China visits: A dataset of Chinese leaders’ foreign visits
Leader visits constitute an important signal in international relations. While studies of U.S. diplomacy can all use the same dataset from the Office of the Historian, IR scholars on China must make do with ad hoc datasets and often need to build their own from scratch. We contribute a novel dataset, C h i n a V i s i t s , to fill this glaring gap. Our dataset has three major advantages: (1) it covers the period from 1998 onwards so that it is w…
Russian power and the state-owned enterprise
Chinese Power and the State-Owned Enterprise
China has become a leading source of outward foreign direct investment (FDI), and the Chinese state exercises a unique degree of influence over its firms. We explore the patterns of political influence over FDI using a comprehensive firm-level data set on Chinese outward FDI from 2000 to 2013. Using six country-level measures of affinity for China, we find that state-owned and globally diversified firms appear to conform most closely to official …
Multinational Banks and IMF Conditionality
We find firm-level evidence that US banks receive preferential treatment in countries under IMF conditionality. We rely on investment location decisions to infer firms’ expectations about future profits and find that US firms are approximately 53 percent more likely to acquire financial firms in countries under financial conditionality. IMF programs without financial conditionality and FDI in other sectors serve as placebo tests. Financial condit…
Corporate Influence in World Bank Lending
The World Bank withholds loan disbursements in order to build a reputation for enforcing conditionality, and multinational firms lobby for these funds to be released. Using data drawn from World Bank reports, we find evidence that (1) participation by Fortune 500 multinational corporations as project contractors and (2) investments by these firms are associated with disbursements that are unjustified by project performance. In addition, these mea…
Mixed Signals: IMF Lending and Capital Markets
The effect of new International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending announcements on capital markets depends on the lender’s political motivations. There are conditions under which lending reduces the risk of a deepening crisis and the risk premium demanded by market actors. Yet the political interests that make lenders willing to lend may weaken the credibility of commitments to reform, and the act of accepting an agreement reveals unfavorable informati…
Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly
Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows…
Informal governance in international organizations: Introduction to the special issue
Risky Signals: The Political Costs of Exchange Rate Policy in Post-Communist Countries
It can be risky for governments to renege on exchange rate commitments, but it is misleading to characterize the costs as audience costs. While an audience costs approach assumes that the punishment for reneging is automatic, we model the choice of exchange rate policy in the shadow of elections as a signaling game between voters and governments, where governments have private information and voters are rational. We find that voters draw differen…
The Kyoto Protocol: Two-Level Bargaining and European Integration1
The politics of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol may suggest a two-level game; yet, our quantitative analysis shows that ratification constraints did not affect bargaining over the Protocol, nor did bargaining outcomes affect ratification. The politics of the Kyoto Protocol are best understood as an example of the 'Europeanization' of international politics: European countries subordinate their domestic politics to international cooperation, and the …
International Organizations as Policy Advisors
How can international organizations persuade governments to adopt policy recommendations that are based on private information when their interests conflict? We develop a game-theoretic model of persuasion that applies regardless of regime type and does not rely on the existence of domestic constituency constraints. In the model, an international organization (IO) and a domestic expert have private information about a crisis, but their preference…
Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy
How is the United States able to control the IMF with only 17 per cent of the votes? How are the rules of the global economy made? This book shows how a combination of formal and informal rules explains how international organizations really work. Randall W. Stone argues that formal rules apply in ordinary times, while informal power allows leading states to exert control when the stakes are high. International organizations are therefore best un…
How to Reform the IMF
The ongoing shift in the distribution of global financial power could come just in time to revitalize the IMF and other major international financial institutions
Risk in International Politics
Representative governments under-invest in public goods that provide insurance against risk, The combination of inequality and risk aversion guarantees that the payoffs to insurance are skewed, so the median voter prefers a sub-optimally low level of investment. The problem is exacerbated by supermajority requirements or the need for international coordination. This accounts for some of the characteristic shortcomings of domestic public policy an…
The International Monetary Fund: A review of the recent evidence
A review of recent quantitative studies on the International Monetary Fund reveals that much of the conventional wisdom is incorrect. Recent studies have demonstrated a new degree of methodological rigor, have drawn more heavily upon insights from political science, and have asked a number of new questions. We review studies of participation in IMF programs, design of IMF conditionality, implementation and enforcement of IMF conditions, conventio…
Choosing How to Cooperate: A Repeated Public-Goods Model of International Relations
International relations theory has borrowed important intuitions from Olson's static public-goods model (hegemonic stability) and the repeated prisoners’ dilemma (theories of international cooperation), and arguments often combine implications from both models. We develop a general, repeated public-goods model. We then allow the qualitative dimensions of cooperation to emerge endogenously: agreements can have broad or narrow membership and entail…
The Scope of IMF Conditionality
International organizations are governed by two parallel sets of rules: formal rules, which embody consensual procedures, and informal rules, which allow exceptional access for powerful countries. A new data set drawn from the IMF's records of conditionality provides an opportunity to study the bargaining process within an important international organization and answer questions about the institution's autonomy. I find evidence of U.S. influence…
Democracy and the Logic of Political Survival
Although democracy is a key concept in political science, debate continues over definitions and mechanisms. Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, & Morrow (2003) make the important claim that most of democracy's effects are in fact due to something conceptually simpler and empirically easier to measure than democracy: the size of the minimum winning coalition that selects the leader. The argument is intuitively appealing and supported by extensive …
The Political Economy of IMF Lending in Africa
Why has IMF lending achieved such poor results in Africa? Is it because the Fund imposes the wrong conditions, or because it fails to enforce them? Analysis of monthly data on 53 African countries from 1990 to 2000 shows that the IMF's loans-for-reform contract lacks credibility because donor countries intervene to prevent rigorous enforcement. Countries that have influence with developed-country patrons-as measured by U.S. foreign aid, membershi…
Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition
With the end of the Cold War, the International Monetary Fund emerged as the most powerful international institution in history. But how much influence can the IMF exert over fiercely contested issues in domestic politics that affect the lives of millions? In Lending Credibility , Randall Stone develops the first systematic approach to answering this question. Deploying an arsenal of methods from a range of social sciences rarely combined, he mou…
Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition
The Use and Abuse of Game Theory in International Relations: The Theory of Moves
The author argues that the theory of moves, which has gained popularity in recent years as an alternative to game-theoretic analysis of strategic interaction, is fundamentally flawed. The theory's adherents argue that it makes theoretical progress by endogenizing the structure of games and introducing new ways of analyzing repeated interactions. The author analyzes the theory of moves from a game-theoretic perspective and challenges its theoretic…
The Scope of IMF Conditionality
International organizations are governed by two parallel sets of rules: formal rules, which embody consensual procedures, and informal rules, which allow exceptional access for powerful countries. A new data set drawn from the IMF's records of conditionality provides an opportunity to study the bargaining process within an important international organization and answer questions about the institution's autonomy. I find evidence of U.S. influence…
The Political Economy of IMF Lending in Africa
Why has IMF lending achieved such poor results in Africa? Is it because the Fund imposes the wrong conditions, or because it fails to enforce them? Analysis of monthly data on 53 African countries from 1990 to 2000 shows that the IMF's loans-for-reform contract lacks credibility because donor countries intervene to prevent rigorous enforcement. Countries that have influence with developed-country patrons-as measured by U.S. foreign aid, membershi…
Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly
Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows…
Chinese Power and the State-Owned Enterprise
China has become a leading source of outward foreign direct investment (FDI), and the Chinese state exercises a unique degree of influence over its firms. We explore the patterns of political influence over FDI using a comprehensive firm-level data set on Chinese outward FDI from 2000 to 2013. Using six country-level measures of affinity for China, we find that state-owned and globally diversified firms appear to conform most closely to official …
Democracy and the Logic of Political Survival
Although democracy is a key concept in political science, debate continues over definitions and mechanisms. Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, & Morrow (2003) make the important claim that most of democracy's effects are in fact due to something conceptually simpler and empirically easier to measure than democracy: the size of the minimum winning coalition that selects the leader. The argument is intuitively appealing and supported by extensive …
International Organizations as Policy Advisors
How can international organizations persuade governments to adopt policy recommendations that are based on private information when their interests conflict? We develop a game-theoretic model of persuasion that applies regardless of regime type and does not rely on the existence of domestic constituency constraints. In the model, an international organization (IO) and a domestic expert have private information about a crisis, but their preference…
Corporate Influence in World Bank Lending
The World Bank withholds loan disbursements in order to build a reputation for enforcing conditionality, and multinational firms lobby for these funds to be released. Using data drawn from World Bank reports, we find evidence that (1) participation by Fortune 500 multinational corporations as project contractors and (2) investments by these firms are associated with disbursements that are unjustified by project performance. In addition, these mea…
Mixed Signals: IMF Lending and Capital Markets
The effect of new International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending announcements on capital markets depends on the lender’s political motivations. There are conditions under which lending reduces the risk of a deepening crisis and the risk premium demanded by market actors. Yet the political interests that make lenders willing to lend may weaken the credibility of commitments to reform, and the act of accepting an agreement reveals unfavorable informati…
Choosing How to Cooperate: A Repeated Public-Goods Model of International Relations
International relations theory has borrowed important intuitions from Olson's static public-goods model (hegemonic stability) and the repeated prisoners’ dilemma (theories of international cooperation), and arguments often combine implications from both models. We develop a general, repeated public-goods model. We then allow the qualitative dimensions of cooperation to emerge endogenously: agreements can have broad or narrow membership and entail…
The Kyoto Protocol: Two-Level Bargaining and European Integration1
The politics of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol may suggest a two-level game; yet, our quantitative analysis shows that ratification constraints did not affect bargaining over the Protocol, nor did bargaining outcomes affect ratification. The politics of the Kyoto Protocol are best understood as an example of the 'Europeanization' of international politics: European countries subordinate their domestic politics to international cooperation, and the …
The Use and Abuse of Game Theory in International Relations: The Theory of Moves
The author argues that the theory of moves, which has gained popularity in recent years as an alternative to game-theoretic analysis of strategic interaction, is fundamentally flawed. The theory's adherents argue that it makes theoretical progress by endogenizing the structure of games and introducing new ways of analyzing repeated interactions. The author analyzes the theory of moves from a game-theoretic perspective and challenges its theoretic…
Risky Signals: The Political Costs of Exchange Rate Policy in Post-Communist Countries
It can be risky for governments to renege on exchange rate commitments, but it is misleading to characterize the costs as audience costs. While an audience costs approach assumes that the punishment for reneging is automatic, we model the choice of exchange rate policy in the shadow of elections as a signaling game between voters and governments, where governments have private information and voters are rational. We find that voters draw differen…
Risk in International Politics
Representative governments under-invest in public goods that provide insurance against risk, The combination of inequality and risk aversion guarantees that the payoffs to insurance are skewed, so the median voter prefers a sub-optimally low level of investment. The problem is exacerbated by supermajority requirements or the need for international coordination. This accounts for some of the characteristic shortcomings of domestic public policy an…
Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition
Multinational Banks and IMF Conditionality
We find firm-level evidence that US banks receive preferential treatment in countries under IMF conditionality. We rely on investment location decisions to infer firms’ expectations about future profits and find that US firms are approximately 53 percent more likely to acquire financial firms in countries under financial conditionality. IMF programs without financial conditionality and FDI in other sectors serve as placebo tests. Financial condit…
The Use and Abuse of Game Theory in International Relations: The Theory of Moves
The author argues that the theory of moves, which has gained popularity in recent years as an alternative to game-theoretic analysis of strategic interaction, is fundamentally flawed. The theory's adherents argue that it makes theoretical progress by endogenizing the structure of games and introducing new ways of analyzing repeated interactions. The author analyzes the theory of moves from a game-theoretic perspective and challenges its theoretic…
Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition
With the end of the Cold War, the International Monetary Fund emerged as the most powerful international institution in history. But how much influence can the IMF exert over fiercely contested issues in domestic politics that affect the lives of millions? In Lending Credibility , Randall Stone develops the first systematic approach to answering this question. Deploying an arsenal of methods from a range of social sciences rarely combined, he mou…
Lending Credibility: The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition
The Political Economy of IMF Lending in Africa
Why has IMF lending achieved such poor results in Africa? Is it because the Fund imposes the wrong conditions, or because it fails to enforce them? Analysis of monthly data on 53 African countries from 1990 to 2000 shows that the IMF's loans-for-reform contract lacks credibility because donor countries intervene to prevent rigorous enforcement. Countries that have influence with developed-country patrons-as measured by U.S. foreign aid, membershi…
The International Monetary Fund: A review of the recent evidence
A review of recent quantitative studies on the International Monetary Fund reveals that much of the conventional wisdom is incorrect. Recent studies have demonstrated a new degree of methodological rigor, have drawn more heavily upon insights from political science, and have asked a number of new questions. We review studies of participation in IMF programs, design of IMF conditionality, implementation and enforcement of IMF conditions, conventio…
Choosing How to Cooperate: A Repeated Public-Goods Model of International Relations
International relations theory has borrowed important intuitions from Olson's static public-goods model (hegemonic stability) and the repeated prisoners’ dilemma (theories of international cooperation), and arguments often combine implications from both models. We develop a general, repeated public-goods model. We then allow the qualitative dimensions of cooperation to emerge endogenously: agreements can have broad or narrow membership and entail…
The Scope of IMF Conditionality
International organizations are governed by two parallel sets of rules: formal rules, which embody consensual procedures, and informal rules, which allow exceptional access for powerful countries. A new data set drawn from the IMF's records of conditionality provides an opportunity to study the bargaining process within an important international organization and answer questions about the institution's autonomy. I find evidence of U.S. influence…
Democracy and the Logic of Political Survival
Although democracy is a key concept in political science, debate continues over definitions and mechanisms. Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, & Morrow (2003) make the important claim that most of democracy's effects are in fact due to something conceptually simpler and empirically easier to measure than democracy: the size of the minimum winning coalition that selects the leader. The argument is intuitively appealing and supported by extensive …
Risk in International Politics
Representative governments under-invest in public goods that provide insurance against risk, The combination of inequality and risk aversion guarantees that the payoffs to insurance are skewed, so the median voter prefers a sub-optimally low level of investment. The problem is exacerbated by supermajority requirements or the need for international coordination. This accounts for some of the characteristic shortcomings of domestic public policy an…
How to Reform the IMF
The ongoing shift in the distribution of global financial power could come just in time to revitalize the IMF and other major international financial institutions
Controlling Institutions: International Organizations and the Global Economy
How is the United States able to control the IMF with only 17 per cent of the votes? How are the rules of the global economy made? This book shows how a combination of formal and informal rules explains how international organizations really work. Randall W. Stone argues that formal rules apply in ordinary times, while informal power allows leading states to exert control when the stakes are high. International organizations are therefore best un…
The Kyoto Protocol: Two-Level Bargaining and European Integration1
The politics of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol may suggest a two-level game; yet, our quantitative analysis shows that ratification constraints did not affect bargaining over the Protocol, nor did bargaining outcomes affect ratification. The politics of the Kyoto Protocol are best understood as an example of the 'Europeanization' of international politics: European countries subordinate their domestic politics to international cooperation, and the …
International Organizations as Policy Advisors
How can international organizations persuade governments to adopt policy recommendations that are based on private information when their interests conflict? We develop a game-theoretic model of persuasion that applies regardless of regime type and does not rely on the existence of domestic constituency constraints. In the model, an international organization (IO) and a domestic expert have private information about a crisis, but their preference…
Informal governance in international organizations: Introduction to the special issue
Risky Signals: The Political Costs of Exchange Rate Policy in Post-Communist Countries
It can be risky for governments to renege on exchange rate commitments, but it is misleading to characterize the costs as audience costs. While an audience costs approach assumes that the punishment for reneging is automatic, we model the choice of exchange rate policy in the shadow of elections as a signaling game between voters and governments, where governments have private information and voters are rational. We find that voters draw differen…
Democracy and Multilateralism: The Case of Vote Buying in the UN General Assembly
Democracies are more supportive of US positions on important votes in the UN General Assembly than of nondemocracies. Is this because democracies share common perspectives, or does this pattern reflect coercion? Since 1985, US law has stipulated that the US State Department identify important votes and that aid disbursements reflect voting decisions. To unravel these alternative explanations, we introduce a strategic statistical model that allows…
Mixed Signals: IMF Lending and Capital Markets
The effect of new International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending announcements on capital markets depends on the lender’s political motivations. There are conditions under which lending reduces the risk of a deepening crisis and the risk premium demanded by market actors. Yet the political interests that make lenders willing to lend may weaken the credibility of commitments to reform, and the act of accepting an agreement reveals unfavorable informati…
Corporate Influence in World Bank Lending
The World Bank withholds loan disbursements in order to build a reputation for enforcing conditionality, and multinational firms lobby for these funds to be released. Using data drawn from World Bank reports, we find evidence that (1) participation by Fortune 500 multinational corporations as project contractors and (2) investments by these firms are associated with disbursements that are unjustified by project performance. In addition, these mea…
Multinational Banks and IMF Conditionality
We find firm-level evidence that US banks receive preferential treatment in countries under IMF conditionality. We rely on investment location decisions to infer firms’ expectations about future profits and find that US firms are approximately 53 percent more likely to acquire financial firms in countries under financial conditionality. IMF programs without financial conditionality and FDI in other sectors serve as placebo tests. Financial condit…
Russian power and the state-owned enterprise
Chinese Power and the State-Owned Enterprise
China has become a leading source of outward foreign direct investment (FDI), and the Chinese state exercises a unique degree of influence over its firms. We explore the patterns of political influence over FDI using a comprehensive firm-level data set on Chinese outward FDI from 2000 to 2013. Using six country-level measures of affinity for China, we find that state-owned and globally diversified firms appear to conform most closely to official …
China visits: A dataset of Chinese leaders’ foreign visits
Leader visits constitute an important signal in international relations. While studies of U.S. diplomacy can all use the same dataset from the Office of the Historian, IR scholars on China must make do with ad hoc datasets and often need to build their own from scratch. We contribute a novel dataset, C h i n a V i s i t s , to fill this glaring gap. Our dataset has three major advantages: (1) it covers the period from 1998 onwards so that it is w…
Probabilistic Democracy
Democracy is an important concept that is difficult to measure, and existing measures have well-known weaknesses. We define democracy narrowly, as electoral accountability, and estimate the probability of democracy using a structural model and data from 1945 to 2008. We allow for strategic voting and find evidence that voters are intimidated into supporting authoritarian leaders. Ratification of the Convention Against Torture by the country in qu…
Economics (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · International Development and Aid (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Finance (6 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works)