Economic Geography, Trade, and War

An agent-based model in which economic exchange and military conflict are emergent processes is used to explore the relationship between trade and war. The model of exchange is an applied analysis of the economics of trading networks. The model of conflict treats war as a breakdown in interstate bargaining due to incomplete information. The simulations explore how initial economic geography, state revisionism, defensive advantage, and technological advancement akin to globalization affect both trade and war. The results show that the relationship between trade and war depends on third factors, and an inverse relationship between trade and war emerges from compact geographies with revisionist states

Not Complements, But Substitutes: Fixed Exchange Rate Commitments, Central Bank Independence, and External Currency Stability

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Societal Preferences, Partisan Agents, and Monetary Policy Outcomes

If different producer groups have divergent interests concerning macroeconomic policies, how do societal preferences translate into state policy outcomes? I develop and test a party-as-agent framework for understanding the importance of societal preferences with regard to monetary policy under capital mobility. Following the principal-agent model, political parties function as agents for different societal principals. Rightist parties tend to represent internationally oriented business groups with preferences for monetary convergence, while leftist parties do the same for domestically oriented groups preferring monetary autonomy under capital mobility. I present statistical evidence showing that OECD leftist governments have been associated with more monetary autonomy and currency variability than their rightist counterparts, even after controlling for basic economic indicators such as inflation. The statistical evidence also shows that societal group size tends not to explain either autonomous monetary policy choices or exchange-rate stability. Thus even large and wealthy societal groups may be unable to obtain their preferred policy outcome when their respective partisan agents do not hold government power.I thank the editor of IO and two anonymous reviewers for their challenging comments and useful suggestions. I also thank Bill Bernhard, Eric Fisher, Tim Frye, Mark Hallerberg, Ed Mansfield, Pat McDonald, Layna Mosley, An bal P rez-Li n, and David Rowe for their comments and advice on the many earlier versions of this article. Finally, thanks are also due to Sawa Omori for her research assistance on this project. All errors remain my own responsibility.

Intergovernmental Organizations, Socialization, and Member-State Interest Convergence

This article explores the constructivists institutional socialization hypothesis, positing that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) make member-state interests more similar over time, thus promoting interest convergence. We first show how this hypothesis can be tested systematically using relatively new data on dyadic interest similarity and joint structured IGO membership, and then we conduct a series of empirical tests. Our results show strong statistical support for the institutional socialization hypothesis, using both global and more restricted regional samples. We also demonstrate how our results are consistent with a longer-term socialization process and cannot be explained by the short-term effect of institutional information. Finally, we show some limits to the institutional socialization hypothesis. Unstructured IGOs reveal no effect in promoting member-state interest convergence. Following recent theory arguing that great powers in the international system often use IGOs for coercive means, we find that institutional socialization gets weaker as the power imbalance within the dyad grows.Thanks to Chuck Boehmer, Heather Elko McKibben, Kate Floros, Erik Gartzke, Chuck Gochman, Michael Goodhart, Yoram Haftel, Volker Krause, Dan London, Andrew Long, Ed Mansfield, Lisa Martin, Tim Nordstrom, Zeki Sarigil, Meg Shannon, Dan Thomas, Lora Viola, Basak Yavcan, and two anonymous reviewers for data, comments, and or helpful suggestions.

Replication Data for: When Are Monetary Policy Preferences Egocentric? Evidence from American Surveys and an Experiment

This paper enters the international/comparative political-economy debate about whether individual-level macroeconomic policy preferences are egocentric and, if so, on what basis (factors, sectors or firms). It argues that contextual information may function as a pre-condition for the emergence of egocentric preferences. With a focus on the tradeoff between using monetary policy for a domestic or an international goal, it presents evidence from three original American surveys using informative vignettes to show how monetary policy preferences exhibit firm-based egocentric variation: individuals whose employer does most of its business in overseas markets have a lesser preference for domestic monetary autonomy. It also presents evidence from a survey experiment to show how the strength of this egocentric relationship depends on the informative power of the vignette: a more contextually informative vignette produces a stronger relationship between overseas business activity and a preference against domestic monetary autonomy