Suchergebnisse

Examines the US Court of International Trade's decisions to affirm or reverse bureaucratic policies, particularly whether political, ideological, and economic factors influence judges' decisions on antidumping and countervailing duty litigation, 1980-90. Some focus on the role of expertise and oversight responsibilities in structuring decision-making of specialized courts.

I analyze the governmental regulation of internationally traded goods produced by U.S. industries. General theories of regulation—most notably "capture" theories and the theory of "congressional dominance"—are used to analyze the decision-making behavior of the U.S. International Trade Commission, which plays a major role in approving and providing tariffs, quotas, and various types of nontariff trade barriers sought by these industries. Unlike previous studies, this one simultaneously accounts for both the supply and demand sides of trade regulation. This work seeks to predict, on a basis of domestic politics, the factors that affect the demand for, and supply of, trade protection for U.S. industries. The methodology consists of applying a nested logit framework to capture the decision behavior of the International Trade Commission and industries simultaneously. The analysis shows that industries do appear to self-select themselves in applying for protection from the International Trade Commission. In light of these findings, it appears that trade protection is subject to domestic political forces similar to those affecting other regulatory policy areas.

When countries emerge from a civil war, accountability and compensation for harms done are crucial for peacebuilding. However, post-civil war governments face uncertain political contexts, delegation problems, difficulties building trust among former combatants, deficits of central administrative capacity, and incentives to reward supporters. Given these challenges, they are unlikely to be able to fairly distribute financial compensation. In Nepal, the awarding of internationally funded compensation for conflict-related losses provides a very tangible test regarding whether factional opportunism or broader public interest considerations guide post-conflict allocations. We hypothesize that without effective institutions, compensation will be skewed in favour of those in power and not proportional to harms suffered. Using individual-level data, we analyse who benefited from the post-conflict settlement, showing those killed by Maoist perpetrators, those sympathetic to the state and members of the state armed forces were more likely to be compensated, a biased, hence unfavourable, outcome for peacebuilding.

That domestic political economic factors are important determinants of a nation's trade barriers has been empirically well established. However, the question of how effective strategically retaliatory trade barriers are in deterring foreign protectionism has received far less systematic empirical attention. In this article we use bilateral nontariff barrier (NTB) data between the United States and five developed partner countries (Japan, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) to systematically examine the effectiveness of strategic retaliation. We employ a simultaneous Tobit model where the home and foreign NTB levels are determined endogenously in a bilateral game. The model provides estimates of deterrence coefficients, that is, the reduction in foreign trade barriers as a result of U.S. retaliation, which we use to characterize the nature of bilateral NTB games. Our hope is that the empirical results presented here, which have realistic though controversial implications, will inform U.S. trade policy.

Die Autoren gehen der Frage nach, inwieweit die Androhung protektionistischer Gegenmaßnahmen eine abschreckende Wirkung aufdie protektionistische Politik anderer Länder besitzt. Dazu werden Daten über nicht-tarifäre Handelshemmnisse im Rahmen bilateraler Wirtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen den USA auf der einen, und Japan und vier EU-Ländern auf der anderen Seite mit Hilfe eines spieltheoretischen Modells analysiert. Das Modell liefert Einschätzungen über den Einfluß (angedrohter) protektionistischer Gegenmaßnahmen auf den Abbau von nicht-tärifären Handelshemmnissen. (SWP-Clv)

The goal of this research is to determine whether the Supreme Court's landmark 2010 Citizens United ruling changed the contribution strategies of employees of major corporations. Using an original dataset of campaign contributions by employees of Fortune 500 companies, we analyze the contribution strategies of these individuals in the 2008 and 2012 presidential election cycles. Overall, our results suggest three important conclusions. First, Citizens United did not alter Fortune 500 employees' contribution patterns to traditional political committees. However, the emergence of Super political action committees (PAC) in 2012 may have pulled employees' contributions from 527 groups, at least in the short term. Second, we find large differences in contributions across resources, and the differences become even more dramatic after Citizens United when CEOs contributed millions to Super PACs. Finally, Fortune 500 employee contributions to traditional political committees still outweigh Super PAC contributions in both numbers and amount. And, importantly, employees of the world's largest corporations were not the driving force behind the increase in spending after Citizens United.

Group theorists led by Olson have observed that common interests do not produce collective action, except under conditions that overcome the free-rider incentive. While collective action theories have captured the imagination of the discipline, there has been surprisingly little examination of the relationship between business collective action and patterns of market structures. Research has instead focused more on firm-level political activity. Accordingly, this research addresses the original theoretical propositions by examining industry associations' political activity nationally. Some forty years after the formulation of the theoretical argument, we find evidence supporting the logic of collective action. More concentrated industries are likelier to have politically active associations than more competitive industries. Adapted from the source document.

While there is a strong theoretical foundation for the relationship between business sectors' political spending and the policy benefits that they receive, the empirical support for it is mixed. We use the logic of this exchange to examine a policy area that directly and significantly affects all businesses, and is thus a most likely case, taxation. Using principally firm-level tax rates of a large random sample of U.S. corporations for the 1998–2005 time period, we determine whether lobbying has measurable effects on firm-level tax rates. Contrary perhaps to popular belief, or at least anecdotal illustration, we find after controlling for firm size and industry-level tax rates, among other controls, that there is no discernible effect of political spending on firm-level taxation: firms that spend more in an effort to affect policy generally or tax policy specifically are no more likely to benefit from lower tax rates. We also examine the possibility that firms in the same industry coordinate efforts to affect tax rates. While we find limited evidence that firms occasionally coordinate within industries – or at least lobby simultaneously – to affect tax rates, perhaps more importantly, we determine that free-riding by smaller firms at the expense of the largest firms is rampant.