States design some international institutions more flexibly than others. What explains this variation? Focusing on preferential trade agreements, we argue that different aspects of institutional design are interdependent. In particular, we posit that deep agreements create an incentive for...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for the last twenty years. A large literature has studied various aspects of this phenomenon. Until very recently, this literature has treated all PTAs as equal. However, PTAs differ significantly in terms of design. In this paper, we...