Using a 30-year panel of quarterly GDP fluctuations from of a broad set of countries, we demonstrate that the signing of a bilateral tax treaty increases the comovement of treaty partners’ business cycles by 1/2 a standard deviation. This effect of fiscal policy is as large as the effect of trade linkages on comovement, and stronger than the effects of several other common financial and investm...

This paper studies how bilateral investment treaties (BITs) affect the trade integration between partner countries. While the overall results from the full sample show that BIT signing is associated with an increase in overall imports that is generally smaller than the effect of WTO membership, BIT signing is found to have a considerable effect on capital goods imports and on imports of differe...

With respect to how it's used for publishing, production, research or just plain old entertainment, the internet is a domain that has for the most part written its rules. But how do you strike a balance between commercial and social imperatives at a time when access to material on the web is becoming increasingly conditional via a myriad laws, treaties and free trade agreements? This week, on W...

Addressing the increasingly globalised determinants of many important problems affecting human health is a complex task requiring collective action. We suggest that part of the solution to addressing intractable global health issues indeed lies with the role of new legal instruments in the form of globally binding treaties, as described in the recent article of Nikogosian and Kickbusch. However...

Treaties (conventions), international custom and the general principles of law generally constitute formal sources law. The present linguistics-oriented study exploring juridical basis specifically focuses on analyzing that treaties. An empirical linguistic expressions forms treaties is supposed to probe into what contracting parties really think when adopting treaty texts. It applies move stru...

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...

Recent research has shown that agreements centered on the adoption of breakthrough technologies can break the deadlock in international climate negotiations if the mitigation technology exhibits a network externality that transforms full cooperation into a self-enforcing outcome. This paper shows that the same externality also increases strategic uncertainty about future technology adoption, wh...