Almost all WTO dispute panels exceed their statutory time limits. This is often seen to indicate a more general problem for panels to manage their tasks. The time required varies considerably across panels however, suggesting that they do not face the same problems. To shed light on these...

The larger trading nations have been the main users of the WTO Dispute Settlement system during its first four years of existence (1995-1998). This has prompted a debate about whether the DS system is biased against smaller and poorer countries, for example, because of a lack of legal capacities...

The merger literature almost exclusively considers mergers between exogenously specified firms. This paper proposes an approach to predict the pattern of mergers in situations where different mergers are feasible. It generalizes the traditional industrial organization approach, employing ideas...

We examine antitrust rules in a two-county general equilibrium trade model, contrasting national and multilateral (cooperative) determination of competition policy, exploring the properties of the policy equilibrium. It is not imperfect competition, but variation in competitive stance between...

The Most-Favored Nation clause (MFN) forbids Members of a trade agreement to discriminate between trading partners. It is typically seen as one of the main features of the multilateral trading system, and appears in several of the agreements in the World Trade Organization. There seems to be a...

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is the dominant form of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), but has received only scarce attention in the theory literature on trade and investment. This paper highlights how the international pattern of ownership of productive assets may depend on features of trade...

The National Treatment clause (NT) is the first-line defence in the GATT (and in most other trade agreements) against opportunistic exploitation of the inevitable incompleteness of the agreement. This paper examines the role of NT as it applies to internal taxation under the GATT. It is shown...

As international economic integration has progressed, policy makers have started to ponder the possible conflicts arising from nationally pursued competition policies in more unified goods markets. An idea underlying much of this discussion is the notion that international trade liberalisation,...

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade agreement and how this depends on the fundamentals of the...

This paper surveys the law and economics literature on WTO dispute settlement. As a background, we first briefly lay out main features of the legal framework, and discuss possible roles of a dispute settlement mechanism. We then discuss the two main themes in the empirical literature on dispute...