One of the enduring lessons of the global financial crisis is that regulatory laxity heightens systemic risk. This paper examines the political sources of regulatory laxity, highlighting the influence of interest groups on governments' commitments to competition (antitrust) regulation in...

Many developing countries liberalized trade policies over the past three decades. We argue that the global spread of ideas contributes to trade liberalization. Building on insights from a rich case-based literature, we suggest an explicit mechanism of trade policy diffusion: U.S.-trained Ph.D....

A strong statistical association between legislative opposition in authoritarian regimes and investment has been interpreted as evidence that authoritarian legislatures constrain executive decisions and reduce the threat of expropriation. Although the empirical relationship is robust, scholars...

This paper studies how international trade influences U.S. presidential elections. We expect the positive employment effects of expanding exports to increase support for the incumbent's party, and job insecurity from import competition to diminish such support. Our national-level models show for...

We examine firm participation in global supply chains to help explain a puzzling decline in protectionist demands in the U.S. despite increased import competition and ongoing currency undervaluation. To explain firm responses to undervaluation, we rely on advances in the international trade...

One of the enduring lessons of the recent financial crisis is that regulatory laxity heightens systemic risk. This paper examines the political sources of regulatory laxity, highlighting the influence of interest groups on governments' commitments to competition (antitrust) policy. I argue that...

This paper investigates empirically the political determinants of stock market development. We argue that those determinants are grounded in distributional cleavages among voters and interest groups. Our argument reverses the sign of the prevailing explanation about the role of partisanship in...

Property rights are essential to economic development but vary with the political environment. We develop and test the claim that government partisanship influences the security of business firms’ property rights: the perceived security of property rights increases when right-wing parties take...

We apply insights from “new, new” trade theory to explain a puzzling decline in U.S. firm antidumping (AD) filings in an era of persistent foreign currency undervaluations and increasing import competition. Firms exhibit heterogeneity both within and across industries regarding foreign...

Analyses of the political economy of exchange-rate policy posit that firms and individuals in different sectors of the economy have distinct policy attitudes toward the level and the stability of the exchange rate. Most such approaches hypothesize that internationally exposed firms prefer more...