When technocratic appointments signal credibility

How do prime ministers manage investors' expectations during financial crises? We take a novel approach to this question by investigating ministerial appointments. When prime ministers appoint technocrats, defined as non-partisan experts, they forgo political benefits and can credibly signal their willingness to pay down their debt obligations. This reduces bond yields, but only at times when the market is sensitive to expected repayments---i.e., during crises. To examine the theory, we develop an event study analysis that employs new data on the background of finance ministers in 21 Western and Eastern European democracies. We find that investors reward technocratic appointments by reducing a country's borrowing costs. Consistent with the theory, technocratic appointments under crises predict lower bond yields. Our findings contribute to the literature on the interplay of financial markets and domestic politics

Only Here to Help? Bargaining and the Perverse Incentives of International Institutions

Many international organizations reduce the costs states incur from conflict. Critics argue that the expectation of such aid, by mitigating potential suffering, perversely incentivizes states to initiate conflict more often. I develop a model that formalizes this intuition. It shows that institutions may still ameliorate suffering in two ways. First, they may absorb so many of the expected costs that they compensate for the fact that conflicts occur more often. Second, aid can have a second-order effect of reducing uncertainty about the costs of conflict; to the extent that this uncertainty explains why parties cannot negotiate a cooperative alternative, aid might actually reduce the incentive to initiate conflict. Whether aid ultimately helps or hurts therefore depends on how it interacts with the informational challenges states face

Multi-Method Research: The Case for Formal Theory

Abstract Formal theory and historical case studies, in particular those that use process-tracing, are extremely well suited companions in multi-method research. To bolster future research employing both case studies and formal theory, we suggest some best practices as well as some (common) pitfalls to avoid

Supplemental Material - Less Is More? Shifting Power and Third-Party Military Assistance

Supplemental Material for Less Is More? Shifting Power and Third-Party Military Assistance by William Spaniel and Burcu Savun in Journal of Conflict Resolution</p

Supplemental Material, JCR662688_Supplemental_Material - Slow to Learn: Bargaining, Uncertainty, and the Calculus of Conquest

<p>Supplemental Material, JCR662688_Supplemental_Material for Slow to Learn: Bargaining, Uncertainty, and the Calculus of Conquest by William Spaniel, and Peter Bils in Journal of Conflict Resolution</p

Sanctions, Uncertainty, and Leader Tenure

DOI: 10.1111/isqu.1219

Bargaining over the bomb : the successes and failures of nuclear negotiations

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of Political Science, 2015.Why do states acquire nuclear weapons? Existing theories of nuclear proliferation fail to account for the impact of bargaining on the process--i.e., credible agreements exist in which rival states make sufficient concessions to convince the potential rising state not to proliferate. This dissertation proves the existence of that range of settlements and the robustness of the inefficiency puzzle. It then provides two main explanations as to why states proliferate anyway. First, if the would-be proliferator expects to lose the ability to construct nuclear weapons in the future, the states face a commitment problem: the rival state would like to promise to continue providing concessions into the future but will renege once proliferation is no longer an option. And second, if the proliferator's rival faces some sort of uncertainty--whether regarding the potential proliferator's ability to go nuclear or regarding its previous proliferation activity--the optimal offer can entail positive probability of nuclear investment. However, the nonproliferation regime's mission to increase the cost of building often leads to Pareto improvement