Studies of voluntary conservation response to changing information about an environmental problem have traditionally been synonymous with studies of information campaign effectiveness. As such, they have not been able to capture the response to actual changes in the environment. This paper takes...

The recent boom of investor-state disputes filed under international investment agreements has fueled a controversial academic and policy debate. Despite its importance, there has been very little work to date on the impacts of compensation claims by investors on FDI flows to the responding host...

International economists often refer to multinational enterprises and foreign firms interchangeably, yet one of the enduring divisions in the globalization debate is whether international law should be strengthened to protect foreign firms from predatory host governments, or rather strengthened...

The rapid and concurrent increase in both foreign investment and government efforts to attract foreign investment at the end of last century makes the question of causality between the two both interesting and challenging. I take up this question for the case of the nearly 2,500 bilateral...

In 2009 the Australian government delivered approximately $8 billion in direct payments to households. These payments were preannounced and randomly allocated to households based on postal codes over a 5-week period. We exploit this random allocation to estimate the causal response of...

Literature on the investment treaty regime has shown little interest in diplomatic interests and agendas as drivers of treaty negotiations. This contrasts with other work on international economic relations, such as the negotiation of preferential trade agreements. Our paper fills this gap...

Using a novel econometric estimator and extensive firm-level surveys, we show that foreign firms' experiences at the hands of host governments tend to be as good, or better, than those reported by their domestic counterparts. Even when foreign firms are exposed to significant political risks in...

In 2009 the Australian government delivered $8 billion in direct payments to households. These payments were pre-announced and randomly allocated over a 5-week period. We exploit this random allocation to estimate the causal response of households consumption expenditures. While we don't find a...