We study whether national leaders’ foreign education influences their foreign policy, measured by voting behavior at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). We hypothesize that “affinity” - pre-existing or developed while studying abroad - makes leaders with foreign education more...

The “Intended nationally determined contributions” (INDCs) communicated by both developing and developed countries represent a crucial element of the Paris agreement. This paper aims at analysing the INDCs submitted by Parties, through the different tools and approaches proposed by the...

We empirically analyze the effect of UN and US economic sanctions on life expectancy and its gender gap in target countries. Our sample covers 98 less developed and newly industrialized countries over the period 1977–2012. We employ a matching approach to account for the endogeneity of...

We examine voting behavior of Western allied countries in line with the United States over the period 1949 until 2019. Descriptive statistics show that voting in line with the United States on resolutions in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) was on average 7.2 percentage points lower...

Joining the EU requires not only that candidate countries fulfil a certain number of conditions, but also that EU countries feel ready to welcome new members.

Russia's unprovoked and unjustified full-scale invasion of Ukraine has significantly changed the geopolitical circumstances on the European continent and is also importantly reshaping the EU's enlargement policy.

Although international sanctions are a widely used instrument of coercion, their economic effects are still not well-understood. This study uses a novel dataset and an event study approach to evaluate the economic consequences of international sanctions, thereby visualizing pre-treatment and...

This paper considers how sanctions affected the Iranian economy using a novel measure of sanctions intensity based on daily newspaper coverage. It finds sanctions to have significant effects on exchange rates, inflation, and output growth, with the Iranian rial over-reacting to sanctions,...

We investigate the effect of economic sanctions on trade flows in countries sharing a border with the sanctioned state. On the one hand, trade models suggest that trade flows should decrease as sanctions disrupt trading routes and economic ties with suppliers and customers. On the other hand,...