We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, thus making democracies last longer. This...

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has the potential to remake political and legal relationships between the EU and the US and pave the way to a new form of global economic governance based on international regulatory cooperation. In particular, TTIP presents an historic...

A narrative of popular discontent against open trade has taken hold, and politicians on both the left and the right have reacted by taking aim at trade agreements and proclaiming their support for economic nationalism. This is both bad policy and a misreading of the views of most Americans....

This paper discusses the relationship between democratic legitimacy and international economic law. It recalls the challenges to democracy through international economic law and claims that traditional elements of democratic legitimacy of international law are insufficient in light of the...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

In this paper, we study if exposure to the institutions of trade partners changes individuals' attitudes towards democracy and favors the process of democratization. We combine survey data with country-level measures of democracy from 1960 to 2015, and exploit the improvement in air, relative to...

This research analyzes the effects of the similarities in economic size and institutional level on bilateral trade. It is interested, whether the similarities at the country size and institutional level encourage enlarging volume of international trade between countries. Using panel data of the...

International economic engagement has been increasingly framed in terms of liberal democratic values. Specifically, Chinese aid has been at the center of this debate. Since Chinese aid comes with "no strings attached," a popular narrative is that Chinese aid poses a challenge to conditional aid,...

Almost half of the world's states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article is the first to explore the determinants of aid donorship. We hypothesize that democratic institutions reduce poor countries' likelihood...