One of the first projects I worked on was a paper with Rachel Brewster investigating when the United States complies with cases it loses at the World Trade Organization. We argued that the United States was likely to comply with adverse decisions when the executive could unilaterally take actions to bring actions American policy into compliance; but that compliance was unlikely to occur when it required coordination with other branches of government.
We built a dataset of the 37 WTO cases the United States had lost, figured out what happened after the loss (which was not as straightforward as I thought it would be), and then tested our argument with some basic regressions. We found evidence consistent with our claim, but it was extremely tough to say much definitive with such a small sample.
Which is why I was excited to see a paper just published in the International Studies Quarterly that looked at the universe of cases filed at the WTO. Lauren Peritz’s new paper is a massive improvement on what we did in essentially every conceivable way. But I was excited to see that the argument we made held up. Here is the abstract of Lauren’s paper:
When do international institutions promote economic cooperation among countries? The World Trade Organization (WTO) is central to the multilateral trade regime and a benchmark for international dispute resolution. Yet it remains unclear whether it has been effective in restoring trade cooperation. This article uses WTO disputes to examine the impact of domestic politics in the defendant country on compliance with adverse legal rulings. I build a novel data set on compliance. Using the method of synthetic case control, I estimate the effect of adverse rulings on trade flows between disputant countries using product level time-series trade data. I infer the defendant complied if trade flows increased after the dispute, relative to estimated levels that would have occurred in the absence of the ruling. The results show domestic political divisions—measured by veto players—hinder compliance.
That said, although Lauren’s paper is now the definitive work on the topic, my paper on WTO compliance will always be particularly important to me. Rachel asked if I would be interested in collaborating on research while I was still a law student, which then set off a chain of events that directly led me to land at Chicago. Short version: Rachel was a former Bigelow fellow, and after we worked together, she implored her former Chicago colleagues to interview me for the Bigelow while I was still on the fence about applying for fellowships. So I’m glad the idea we worked on together holds up with dramatically better data (also, thanks again Rachel!).