Do conflicts among naval powers hurt international trade? In theory the commercially relevant aspects of aggressive naval power can either thwart trade (through blockades, embargoes, commerce raiding, and guerre de course strategies) or facilitate trade (through control of trade routes and...

The advent of Cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoins) is challenging traditional financial and governance institutions. It is expected that over a period of the next few years, cryptocurrencies may be the dominant mode of value exchange. In such a scenario, there will be a paradigm shift in the...

Economic resources are often seen as decisive for the outcomes of military conflicts. This paper asks whether “deeper pockets” help win wars. We construct a fine-grained dataset covering more than 700 interstate disputes and rely on exogenous resource price shocks to estimate the causal...

Incomplete information on the degree to which governments internalize the long-run interests of the state is an essential element of information asymmetry in international relations. A reputational model with such incomplete information captures two observed facts: i. costly activities, among...

The negotiation of multilateral agreements has stalled at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The action is among groups of like-minded WTO Members, either regionally or in open plurilateral agreements (OPAs) in Geneva at the WTO. There is currently no consensus among WTO Members to include...

We provide a synthesis of the theoretical models that study the use of escape clauses, also known as safeguards, in multilateral and preferential trade agreements. We consider models that explain this type of flexibility based on economic efficiency, political economy shocks, and...

This paper introduces the third update/release of the Global Sanctions Data Base (GSDB-R3). The GSDB-R3 extends the period of coverage from 1950-2019 to 1950-2022, which includes two special periods – COVID-19 and the war between Russia and Ukraine. The new update of the GSDB contains a total...

The remarkable increase in the use of economic sanctions as a coercive tool of foreign policy over the past quarter century has been accompanied by an equally rapid growth in the number of academic and policy studies, which most often aim at quantifying the economic effects of sanctions and/or...

Capitalizing on the latest developments in the gravity literature, we utilize two new datasets on sanctions and trade to study the impact of economic sanctions on international trade in the mining sector, which includes oil and natural gas. We demonstrate that the gravity equation is well suited...

Does sharing the same religion, civilization or racial proximity lead to more peaceful relations between countries? This paper argues that cultural similarity can actually cause wars, which occur to combat diffusion. This new theory of war combines the models of Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) and...