In 2009 the Australian government delivered $8 billion in direct payments to households. These payments were pre-announced and randomly allocated over a 5-week period. We exploit this random allocation to estimate the causal response of households consumption expenditures. While we don't find a...

International economists often refer to multinational enterprises and foreign firms interchangeably, yet one of the enduring divisions in the globalization debate is whether international law should be strengthened to protect foreign firms from predatory host governments, or rather strengthened...

The recent boom of investor-state disputes filed under international investment agreements has fueled a controversial academic and policy debate. Despite its importance, there has been very little work to date on the impacts of compensation claims by investors on FDI flows to the responding host...

Literature on the investment treaty regime has shown little interest in diplomatic interests and agendas as drivers of treaty negotiations. This contrasts with other work on international economic relations, such as the negotiation of preferential trade agreements. Our paper fills this gap...

Using a novel econometric estimator and extensive firm-level surveys, we show that foreign firms' experiences at the hands of host governments tend to be as good, or better, than those reported by their domestic counterparts. Even when foreign firms are exposed to significant political risks in...