Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) limit member-states' trade policy discretion; consequently policy uncertainty is mitigated. Reductions in policy uncertainty stemming from accession to a PTA improve the resource allocation decisions of the voters and reduce deadweight losses from the need to...

Transparency is often viewed as crucial to government accountability, but its measurement remains elusive. This concept encompasses many dimensions, which have distinct effects. In this paper, we focus on a specific dimension of transparency: governments' collection and dissemination of...

Are democracies more transparent than other types of political regimes? Many people believe that the presence of elections alone is not sufficient for a country to be considered democratic, and that transparency must be included as part of the definition of political regime. We agree that...

Are democracies more transparent than other types of political regimes? The answer to this question is often assumed to be yes. The contestability of elections and transparency of policy-making are however, analytically distinct concepts. We investigate theoretically the willingness of...

Traditional international relations theory holds that states will join only those international institutions with which they generally intend to comply. Here we show when this claim might not hold. We construct a model of an authoritarian government's decision to sign the UN Convention Against...