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Conditional lending by the IMF is predicated, in part, on the belief that IMF programs are associated with increased capital inflows to participating countries. This belief is generally consistent with theoretical arguments in the academic literature (e.g., Bird and Rowlands 1997; Bordo et al. 2004) but the empirical literature often finds otherwise (e.g., Jensen 2004). This paper argues that the effect of IMF agreements on a country's access to foreign direct investment (FDI) depends on its domestic institutions. Access to FDI depends on a country's ability to credibly commit to implementation, and this ability varies systematically across regime type. The theory is empirically tested using a treatment effects model with a Markov transition in the treatment equation in a dataset covering 142 countries from 1976 to 2006. We find that in democracies IMF program participation has a strong positive effect on FDI inflows and in autocracies participation has a weak negative effect. Adapted from the source document.

This article analyzes an understudied and contested form of government taking, transfer restriction, which has supplanted expropriation as the most ubiquitous and costly type of international property rights violation. Veto-player-type constraints curtail governments' ability to engage in outright and (nontransfer related) creeping expropriation but have little impact on their ability to generate wealth via transfer restrictions. We use a formal model to derive testable implications regarding the effect of political institutions and domestic politics on governments' ability to collect these two types of rent. Empirically, we use novel time-series cross-sectional data to show that while veto-player-type political constraints diminish expropriation risk, transfer risk is much less affected: even constrained governments impose transfer restrictions.

Scholarship suggests the profits from conquest have decreased over time. Given this, why were some states faster to abandon profit-motivated conquest, and why are some still seeking wealth from territorial control? We argue that land-rent dependence influences a regime's economic preference for territory. The more a state depends on rents extracted from land (i.e., the more land-oriented the economy), the greater its willingness to invest in securing control of territory. We develop a novel measure of land orientation, with 200 years of data, to evaluate the linkages between land orientation and military competition over territory. Across 160 regression models, we find robust evidence that land orientation predicts territorial competition. These results hold in both democracies and autocracies. The global reduction in land-oriented states offers a plausible explanation for the decline in the number of large-scale territorial conquests. Our findings also explain why some states retain strong economic motivations for conquest.