This paper scrutinizes the effects of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) and national treatment provisions in a two-period model where foreign investment is subject to domestic regulation and a holdup problem. It shows that ISDS can mitigate the holdup problem and increases aggregate...

The proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the European Union and the United States of America would be the largest preferential trade agreement in the world. Encompassing almost half of world GDP, it will have strong economic effects on Germany. In this paper, we...

Legal conflicts between multinational firms and host governments are often decided by international arbitration panels - as opposed to courts in the host country - due to provisions in international investment agreements known as Investor State Dispute Settlements (ISDS). Critics fear that ISDS...

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have proliferated over the past 50 years such that the number of pairs of countries with BITs is roughly as large as the number of country-pairs that belong to bilateral or regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs). The purpose of this study is to provide...

This paper shows that Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) makes multinational firms more aggressive by increasing cost-reducing investments with the aim to enlarge the potential compensation an ISDS provision may offer. While a larger investment reduces the market distortion, it will also...

We document key features of the deepening economic relationship between Brazil and China. This is evident from sharply increased bilateral trade and foreign direct investment flows and also from enhanced cohesion of negotiating positions in international fora. Data presented show bilateral trade...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

This paper empirically explores the connection between two recent phenomena in the European scenario: the dramatic upsurge of non-tariff trade measures and the remarkable rise in the role of European business lobbies. While these two facts have been widely recognized by the international trade...

We propose a simple and flexible econometric approach to quantify ex-ante the "deep" impact of trade liberalization and the "hard" effects of protection with the empirical structural gravity model. Specifically, we argue that the difference between the estimates of border indicator variables for...