The WTO has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand-off, where the WTO has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage, and...

International investment agreements employ dispute settlement procedures that differ markedly from their counterparts in trade agreements along three key dimensions: standing (i.e., the right to file grievances), the nature of the remedy, and the remedial period. In the state-to-state dispute...

We analyze whether preferential trade agreements (PTAs) affect the incidence and pattern of antidumping (AD) filings. We estimate AD provisions in PTAs have decreased the incidence of intra-PTA AD cases by 33-55% and have increased the number of AD actions against non-PTA members by 10-30%. The...

This paper presents a new model of the domino effect which is used to generate an empirical index of how "contagious" FTAs are with respect to third nations. We test our contagion hypothesis together with alternative specifications of interdependence and other political, economical and...

Existing formal models of the relationship between trade policy and regulatory policy suggest the potential for a regulatory race to the bottom. WTO rules and disputes, however, center on complaints about excessively stringent regulations. This paper bridges the gap between the existing formal...

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...