International law, political science and economics scholars are all concerned with analyzing the performance of the WTO as an organization. In this paper we focus on the objectives that these different disciplines attribute to the WTO and how performance is assessed against these objectives. The...

International tribunals rely on interpretation of legal texts as a crucial tool in adjudication. What is puzzling is the increasingly wide variation we observe in treaty interpretation by international tribunals across policy areas and over time. The international relations (IR) literature has...

Scholars have increasingly theorized, and debated, the decision by states to create and delegate authority to international courts, as well as the subsequent autonomy and behavior of those courts, with principal-agent and trusteeship models disagreeing on the nature and extent of states’...

States design some international institutions more flexibly than others. What explains this variation? Focusing on preferential trade agreements, we argue that different aspects of institutional design are interdependent. In particular, we posit that deep agreements create an incentive for...

This article introduces a novel database on investment treaties: called the Electronic Database of Investment Treaties (EDIT). We describe the genesis of the database and what makes EDIT the most comprehensive and systematic database to date. What stands out besides the coverage is that treaties...

Scholars and negotiators often assert that model treaty texts published by international organizations (IO) shape investment treaty design. This paper empirically investigates this role of IOs as shadow drafters. It tracks the imprint of six IO templates on the text of negotiated international...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for the last twenty years. A large literature has studied various aspects of this phenomenon. Until very recently, this literature has treated all PTAs as equal. However, PTAs differ significantly in terms of design. In this paper, we...