Die in vielen internationalen Investitionsabkommen festgeschriebenen Regeln zur Streitschlichtung zwischen ausländischen Investoren und den Gaststaaten stoßen in Politik und Öffentlichkeit auf zunehmenden Widerstand. Die Auswertung einer neueren Datenbank der UNCTAD über insgesamt 739...

It is widely believed that foreign aid may help conflict-affected countries to recover after the settlement of conflicts. However, the available empirical evidence supporting this view largely neglects the heterogeneous nature of aid. Drawing on the conflict database of the Uppsala Conflict Data...

This study examines the effects of greenfield FDI and cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on government size in host countries of FDI. Using panel data for up to 130 countries for the period from 2003-2011, the study specifically tests the compensation hypothesis, suggesting that by...

Self-interested and biased arbitrators are often held responsible for the legitimacy crisis of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Based on UNCTAD's database on ISDS since the late 1990s, we find no compelling evidence that arbitrators are systematically biased. Many disputes are handled...

When an investor sues a state for alleged breaches of its obligations under an investment treaty or a trade agreement with investment provisions, all that should matter for who wins the case are the merits of the claim itself. Alas, investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) does not take place...

By tracking the changes in different margins of Theil indices during the period 1995-2015, we re-consider the question of whether bilateral and multilateral donors have targeted aid increasingly to particularly needy recipient countries with relatively good governance in order to improve the...

Aid proliferation and a lack of coordination are widely recognized as serious problems for aid effectiveness, and donors have repeatedly promised to tackle them, e.g. in the Paris Declaration in 2005 and the Accra Agenda for Action in 2008. In this paper, we employ geocoded aid data from Uganda...

Estimating two-step selection models, we find that more democratic governments are more likely to conclude preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and to agree to stricter investment provisions related to pre-establishment national treatment and investor-state dispute settlement in PTAs. This is...

We raise the hypothesis that aid specifically targeted at economic infrastructure helps developing countries attract higher FDI inflows through improving their endowment with infrastructure in transportation, communication, energy and finance. By performing 3SLS estimations we explicitly account...

We address the question of whether foreign aid helps attract foreign direct investment (FDI). This could be achieved if well targeted aid removed critical impediments to higher FDI inflows. In particular, we test the hypothesis that aid for education is an effective means to increase FDI flows...