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...

It is hard to think of a better topic for multi-disciplinary study than trade retaliation in the WTO. When a country violates WTO rules, the remedy of last resort is bilateral, state-to-state trade sanctions. Such trade sanctions are imposed against the violating country by one or more other WTO...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs), of which TTIP is but a recent incarnation, are not as "preferential" as they used to be. Traditional PTAs mainly exchanged "club goods", that is, goods or tariff concessions that are "non-rivalrous" (use by one does not diminish availability to others) but...

Despite the shift from multilateral negotiations on legally binding mitigation commitments to the decentralized nonbinding Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) approach in global climate policy, governments and other stakeholders continue to insist that fairness principles guide...

This paper is now published as:Bernauer, Thomas, Kalbhenn, Anna, Spilker, Gabriele, Koubi, Vally. 2010. A Comparison of International and Domestic Sources of Global Governance Dynamics: Explaining Global Environmental Treaty Ratifications, 1950-2000. British Journal of Political Science...

While global trade talks have been making very little progress in recent years, the number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) has grown rapidly, and many of these institutions are reaching much deeper into the domestic political arena than traditional multilateral trade liberalization....