We provide a simple but novel model of trade agreements that highlights the role of transaction costs, renegotiation and dispute settlement. The model allows us to characterize the appropriate remedy for breach and whether the agreement should be structured as a system of "property rights" or...

Formal economic analysis of trade agreements typically treats disputes as synonymous with concerns about enforcement. But in reality, most WTO disputes involve disagreements of interpretation concerning the agreement, or instances where the agreement is simply silent. And some have suggested...

What incentives do governments have to negotiate "new trade agreements," i.e., agreements that constrain not only governments' choices of tariffs, but also their domestic regulatory policies? We focus on horizontal product standards, i.e., those that impose requirements along a horizontal...

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that policy uncertainty can significantly affect firm level investment and entry decisions in the context of international trade. When market entry costs are sunk, policy uncertainty can create a real option value of waiting to enter foreign markets...

This paper presents both analytics and numerical simulation results relevant to proposals for carbon motivated regional trade agreements summarized in Dong amp; Whalley(2008). Unlike traditional regional trade agreements, by lowing tariffs on participant's low carbon emission goods and setting...

In the last decade, economists have produced a considerable body of research suggesting that the historical origin of a country's laws is highly correlated with a broad range of its legal rules and regulations, as well as with economic outcomes. We summarize this evidence and attempt a unified...

Significant amounts of private capital have flowed out of several of the more heavily indebted developing countries. This outflow, often called "capital flight ," largely escapes taxation by the borrowing-country government, and has generated concern about the prospects for future servicing of...

Conventional wisdom holds that lack of government commitment deters foreign investment in developing countries. Yet this explanation is not convincing because some econometric studies have found little support for the role of political risk and host governments can offer upfront subsidies that...

Recent research documents that ownership concentration is higher in countries with weak investor protection. However, drawing on panel data on corporate ownership in 34 countries between 1995 and 2006, we show this pattern does not hold for newly public firms, which tend to have concentrated...

While governments have multiple tax instruments available to them, studies of the effect of tax policy on the locational decisions of multinationals typically focus exclusively on host country corporate income tax rates and their interaction with home country tax rules. This paper examines the...