In recent decades, Southeast Asian economies have prospered through an outward-oriented strategy, through intra-regional integration under the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) initiative and through participating in the East Asian production networks. In the 1970-80ś, South...

Our experimental analysis of alliances in conflicts leads to three main findings. First, even in the absence of repeated interaction, direct contact or communication, free-riding among alliance members is far less pronounced than what would be expected from non-cooperative theory. Second, this...

Recent international climate negotiations suggest that complete agreements are unlikely to materialize. Instead, partial cooperation between like-minded countries appears a more likely outcome. In this paper we analyze the effects of such partial cooperation between like-minded countries. In...

After World War II, town twinning became popular, notably in Germany. This was mainly a reaction to the war experience, and it was aimed at creating renewed international understanding and co-operation between German cities and cities in other countries. The contacts created by town twinning...

This paper analyzes the setting of national patent policies in the global economy. In the standard model with free trade and social-welfare-maximizing governments à la Grossman and Lai (2004), cross-border positive policy externalities induce individual countries to select patent strengths that...

Over the past 70 years, the number of international environmental agreements (IEAs) has increased substantially, highlighting their prominent role in environmental governance. This paper applies the toolkit of network analysis to identify the network properties of international environmental...

We propose an immigration policy based on the model of cooperatives. Incoming migrants have to acquire a participation certificate. In exchange, the immigrants may enter the country of choice without danger. The revenue goes to the country of the recipient nation rather than to human smugglers....

This paper explores official trade data to identify patterns of smuggling in international trade. Our main measure of interest is the difference in matched partner trade statistics, i.e., the extent to which the recorded export value in the source country deviates from the reported import value...

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of...