In this paper we are interested in the relationship between globalization, political institutions (notably, democracy) and international environmental commitments. This relationship has been the subject of a particularly intensive debate and the existing literature offers a wide range of partly...

Civil society is commonly assumed to have a positive effect on international cooperation. This paper sheds light on one important facet of this assumption: we examine the impact of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) on ratification behavior of countries vis-à-vis international...

The effects of defense spending on economic performance and, in particular, on economic growth have been studied extensively in the literature. The empirical findings have been ambiguous so far, partly reflecting the econometric difficulties involved in the estimation of this relationship. The...

Much of the International Relations literature assumes that there is a “depth versus participation” dilemma in international politics: shallower international agreements attract more countries and greater depth is associated with less participation. We argue that this conjecture is too...

This article reviews the existing theoretical arguments and empirical findings linking renewable and non-renewable natural resources to the onset, intensity, and duration of intrastate as well as interstate armed conflict. Renewable resources are supposedly connected to conflict via scarcity,...

Despite many claims by high-ranking policymakers and some scientists that climate change breeds violent conflict, the existing empirical literature has so far not been able to identify a systematic, causal relationship of this kind. This may either reflect de facto absence of such a...

We argue that participation in international agreements is influenced by their design characteristics, notably commitment levels, measured by the specificity of obligations, and compliance mechanisms, measured by monitoring, enforcement, assistance, and dispute settlement provisions in treaties....

Theories explaining government size and its consequences are of two varieties. The first portrays government as a provider of public goods and a corrector of externalities. The second associates larger governments with bureaucratic inefficiency and special-interest-group influence. What...

In this paper we are interested in the relationship between globalization, political institutions (notably, democracy) and international environmental commitments. This relationship has been the subject of a particularly intensive debate and the existing literature offers a wide range of partly...

We study the effects of economic globalization (liberalization of international trade and investment flows) on the environment in the context of a model that integrates standard factor endowment theory (FET) with the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH). Both FET and PHH imply that inward investment...