International Institutional Law

International Trade and Institutional Change ∗

This paper analyzes the impact of international trade on the quality of institutions, such as contract enforcement, property rights, or investor protection. It presents a model in which institutional differences play two roles: they create rents for some parties within the economy, and they are a source of comparative advantage in trade. Institutional quality is determined as an equilibrium of ...

Institutional Quality and International Trade

Institutions — quality of contract enforcement, property rights, shareholder protection, and the like — have received a great deal of attention in recent years. Yet trade theory has not considered the implications of institutional differences, beyond treating them simply as different technologies or taxes. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we propose a simple model of international t...

Institutional herding in international markets

This paper studies herding behavior of institutional investors in international markets. First, we document the existence of wide-spread herding in 41 countries (referred to as ‘‘target countries’’ hereafter) in the sample. We then examine the relation between contemporaneous institutional demand and future returns and find that institutional herding stabilizes prices. Next, we examine the rela...

On Teaching International Law

InternatIonal Soft law

Although the concept of soft law has existed for years, scholars have not reached consensus on why states use soft law or even whether “soft law” is a coherent analytic category. In part, this confusion reflects a deep diversity in both the types of international agreements and the strategic situations that produce them. In this paper, we advance four complementary explanations for why states u...