Economic theorists of international environmental cooperation and regime theorists who focus on the environment ask the same two basic research questions: why does international environmental cooperation emerge in some cases, but not in others, and why is cooperation wide and deep in some cases,...

Existing studies analyzing the so-called ‘resource curse’ hypothesis regress growth in gross domestic product (GDP) on some measure of resource-intensity. This is problematic as GDP counts natural and other capital depreciation as income. Deducting depreciation from GDP to arrive at genuine...

There is an established theoretical and empirical case-study literature arguing that environmental pressure groups have a real impact on pollution levels. Our original contribution to this literature is to provide the first systematic quantitative test of the strength of environmental...

Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have become the most important legal mechanism for the encouragement of foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries. Yet practically no systematic evidence exists on what motivates capital-exporting developed countries to sign BITs earlier with...