It is well established that connections to government officials confer important benefits to firms. However, past work has ignored the crucial role that ties to other firms in the same industry (peer ties) also play in facilitating firms' political participation. We develop new theory that...

A causal relationship between diaspora populations and bilateral foreign direct investment has been established empirically, but the causal mechanism driving this relationship remains unclear. Do diaspora-owned foreign firms enjoy a competitive advantage in the homeland, and if so, what accounts...

This paper analyzes an understudied and contested form of sovereign theft, transfer restriction, which has supplanted expropriation as the most ubiquitous and costly type of international property rights violation. Veto-player-type constraints curtail governments' ability to engage in outright...

Quantitative scholars in international relations often draw repeatedly on the same sources of country-year data across a diverse range of projects. The IPE Data Resource seeks to provide a public good to the field by standardizing and merging together 951 variables from 78 core IPE data sources...

Political risk deters foreign direct investment (FDI) and deprives developing countries of much needed capital. However, the negative effect of political risk on FDI in the aggregate masks important variation across different types of risk and different types of multinational firms. I argue that...

A causal relationship between diaspora populations and bilateral foreign direct investment has been established empirically, but the question of which elements of diaspora difference are responsible for this relationship remains unanswered. A growing literature in economic sociology and business...

Political risk is a complex phenomenon. This complexity has incentivized scholars to take a piecemeal approach to understanding it. Nearly all scholarship has targeted a single type of political risk (expropriation) and, within this risk, a single type of firm (MNCs) and a single type of...

Unrecognized states are characterized by stagnant or crumbling economies and political instability, often serve as havens for illicit trade, and challenge the territorial sovereignty of recognized states. Their persistence is both intellectually puzzling and normatively problematic, but...

Information voids reflect a lack of publicly available information about a country’s investment climate, and represent the information problems associated with institutional voids. We argue that foreign investors differ in their sensitivity to information voids based on their own private...

The challenge of public administration reform is well-known: politicians often have little interest in the efficient implementation of government policy. Using new data from 439 World Bank public sector reform loans in 109 countries, we demonstrate that such reforms are significantly less likely...