The Permanent Neutrality 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...

Communism, Value Neutrality and Monetary Neutrality

One of the most puzzling aspects about the functioning of the floating exchange rate regime of the 1980s has been that huge swings in exchange rate have had only muted effects on anything real. To understand this phenomenon, we study the relationship between communism and value neutrality and monetary neutrality. We find that the symmetry of communism is bound to lead to value neutrality. In th...