Bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have proliferated over the past 50 years such that the number of pairs of countries with BITs is roughly as large as the number of country-pairs that belong to bilateral or regional preferential trade agreements (PTAs). The purpose of this study is to provide...

Conventional wisdom has it that proportional representation leads to more coalition governments and so to greater government spending, especially in redistributive categories favoured by special-interest groups. In contrast, we show in a theoretical model that first-past-the-post systems of...