Strategy research often aims to empirically establish a causal relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable such as firm performance. For many important strategy research questions, however, traditional empirical techniques are not sufficient to establish causal effects...

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 Arab Spring dramatically increased investors' perceptions of political risk in MENA. An examination of these perceptions indicates long-run optimism that political transitions in the region – if democratic and coupled with political stability – could increase FDI and contribute to MENA's...

Using data on international investment arbitration, the authors catalog the types of state actors involved in disputes and the actions that lead to arbitration. We find that the majority of disputes are the result of actions taken by the executive branch.

While existing research has suggested that delegating foreign aid allocation decisions to a multilateral aid fund may incentivize recipient countries to invest in bureaucratic quality, our analysis links the fund's decision rules to recipient-country investment by explicitly modeling the...

We analyze the spread of policies dealing with international trafficking in human beings. Arguing that countries are unlikely to make independent choices, we identify pressure, externalities and learning or emulation as plausible diffusion mechanisms for spatial dependence in anti-trafficking...

We argue that membership in International Organizations (IOs) is an important determinant of FDI inflows. To the extent that membership restricts a country from pursuing policies that are harmful to investors, it can signal low political risk. Using data over the 1971-2005 period, we find that...

Using the KOF Index of Globalization and two indices of economic freedom, we empirically analyze whether globalization and economic liberalization affect governments´ respect for human rights using a panel of 106 countries over the 1981-2004 period. According to our results, physical integrity...

This study explores a basic idea in political economy: Trading money for political influence. Our focus is at the level of international institutions, where governments may exploit their influence in one organization to gain leverage over another. In particular, we consider the lending...

We argue that perceived fairness of the income generation process affects the association between income inequality and subjective well-being, and that there are systematic differences in this regard between countries that are characterized by a high or, respectively, low level of actual...