The respect for and protection of civil liberties are one of the fundamental roles of the state, and many consider civil liberties as sacred and "nontradable." Using cross-country representative surveys that cover 15 countries and over 370,000 respondents, we study whether and the extent to...

Freedom of movement is considered a basic human right by the majority of countries of the world. As defined in practice, it encompasses the right to move internally within a country, the right to move abroad, and the right to return from abroad. It does not include the right of an individual...

This paper investigates the extent to which strategic objectives of the U.S. government influenced news coverage during the Cold War. We establish two relationships: 1) strategic objectives of the U.S. government cause the State Department to under-report human rights violations of strategic...

With the continuing expansion of global economic integration, labor standards in developing countries have become a hot button issue. One result has been a proliferation of efforts to use the market to put pressure directly on multinational corporations to improve wages and working conditions in...

We investigate whether the inclusion of social rights in political constitutions affects social performance. More specifically, we analyze whether including the right to education in the constitution has been related to better "educational outcomes." We rely on data for 61 countries that...

We investigate the consequences of anti-LGBT laws in Poland for suicide attempts and fatalities by applying border-area difference-in-differences models to county-level data. We find that annual suicide attempts increased by 16%, or 5 attempts per 100k capita, after the enactment of anti-LGBT...

Globally, coercive labor (i.e., forced, bonded, and/or trafficked labor) and child labor are disproportionately prevalent in environments with weak regulatory enforcement and state capacity. Effective strategies for addressing them may therefore need to align with the private incentives of...

We exploit the recent declassification of CIA documents and examine whether there is evidence of US power being used to influence countries' decisions regarding international trade. We measure US influence using a newly constructed annual panel of CIA interventions aimed at installing and...