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AbstractInternational relations scholarship has made great progress on the study of compliance with international agreements. While persuasive, most of this work has focused on states'de jurecompliance decisions, largely excluding thede factobehavior of nonstate actors whose actions the agreement hopes to constrain. Of particular interest has been whether the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention (ABC) might reduce the propensity of multinational corporations (MNCs) to bribe officials in host countries through its mechanisms of extraterritoriality and extensive peer review. Unfortunately, research is hampered by reporting bias. Since the convention raises the probability of investors' punishment for bribery in their home countries, it reduces both the incentives for bribery and willingness to admit to the activity. This generates uncertainty over which of these incentives drives any correlation between signing the convention and reductions in reported bribery. We address this problem by employing a specialized survey experiment that shields respondents and reduces reporting bias. We find that after the onset of Phase 3 in 2010, when the risk of noncompliance increased for firms subject to the OECD-ABC, those MNCs reduced their actual bribery relative to their nonsignatory competitors.

Reforming agriculture trade policy is key to breaking the deadlock in multilateral trade negotiations. While existing studies have focused on institutions and interest group barriers to agriculture trade reform in developed countries, most have failed to recognize the broad support for agriculture protection among developed countries. In this article we examine one of the drivers of this support: the ability of politicians to frame their own agriculture policies as less generous relative to those of other countries. Drawing on existing literature on heuristics, we argue that voters are malleable to politicians' comparative framing of agriculture policies. Using an original survey experiment in the United States, we find that framing US agriculture as less generous than other countries generates an additional 12% of respondents supporting increased farm payments to US farmers. These results speak to the difficulty in reforming agriculture and more broadly about the lack of public support for unilateral trade liberalization. (International Interactions (London)/ FUB)

There is a growing literature on how natural resources affect both economic performance and political regimes. In this article the authors add to this literature by focusing on how natural resource wealth affects the incentives of governments to uphold contracts with foreign investors across all sectors. They argue that although all states suffer reputation costs from reneging on contracts, governments in natural-resource-dependent economies are less sensitive to these costs, leading to a greater probability of expropriation and contract disputes. Specifically, leaders weigh the benefits of reneging on contracts with investors against the reputation costs of openly violating agreements with firms. The authors' theoretical model predicts a positive association between resource wealth and expropriation. Using a data set from the political risk insurance industry, the authors show that resource dependent economies have much higher levels of political risk.

The authors find that there are strong political benefits to attracting FDI at the state-level in the United States, and that fiscal incentives for attracting such investment, regardless of their effectiveness, may be a strategic political tool for state politicians.

The authors find that there are strong political benefits to attracting FDI at the state-level in the United States, and that fiscal incentives for attracting such investment, regardless of their effectiveness, may be a strategic political tool for state politicians.

There is a substantial literature that has linked past acts of violence to investment. In this article, we argue that the appropriate mechanism linking violence to investment is investor perceptions of risk, in which forward-looking investors attempt to predict the likelihood of future political violence. We take advantage of a new data source—the price paid by investors to purchase risk insurance coverage—to more accurately capture how risk is assessed in investment decision making. Building on the civil war literature, we offer a broad explanatory model of variation in violence risk in the developing world. After controlling for recent past experiences with violence, we find that wealth and democracy significantly affect the perception of risk, whereas demographic factors and natural resource endowments have limited, if any, influence.

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 have not provided systematic evidence that authoritarian parliaments are able to restrain the actions of state leaders, reverse activities they disagree with, or remove authoritarian leaders who violate the implied power-sharing arrangement. This article shows that authoritarian legislatures, by providing a forum for horse trading between private actors, are better at generating corporate governance legislation that protects investors from corporate insiders than they are at preventing expropriation by governments. The statistical analysis reveals that the strength of authoritarian legislatures is associated with corporate governance rules and not expropriation risk. Adapted from the source document.