The German Commercial Treaties

Vienna Conference on the Law of Treaties

Climate treaties and approaching catastrophes

If the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty, and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs, treaties can easily coordinate countries’ behavior so as to avoid the threshold. Where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower, treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe, sustaining only modest cuts in emis...

Treaties: Behaviour-Controlling Capabilities

Conventional approaches to access-control, such as ACLs, do not scale well enough for distributed systems. Capabilities on the other hand offer scalability and adaptability advantages in large-scale distributed environments due to their being held and managed by the system’s users/agents rather than by the middleware. However the structure of capabilities is only able to provide simple sequence...

The Political Economy of Weak Treaties∗

In recent decades, democratic countries have signed hundreds of international environmental agreements (IEAs). Most of these are weak and do not include effective enforcement. To study this puzzle, we propose a positive theory of IEAs in which the political incumbents negotiate in the shadow of reelections. We show that incumbents are prone to negotiate treaties that are simultaneously overambi...

Climate treaties and the imperative of enforcement

The emission limits in the Kyoto Protocol are too generous. Simply tightening these limits, however, will not make a new climate treaty any more effective at addressing climate change unless the other problems with Kyoto are also addressed. A new climate treaty arrangement must enforce both participation and compliance. This might be done by applying an enforcement mechanism, such as a trade re...