Book
Regulating Risk: How Private Information Shapes Global Safety Standards. 2023. Cambridge University Press (paperback and hardcover available on Amazon, or read it online through Cambridge)
When governments impose stringent regulations that impede domestic competition and international trade, should we conclude this is a deliberate attempt to protect industry or an honest effort to protect the population? My book offers a third possibility: these regulations reflect producers’ ability to exploit private information. Combining extensive data on agrochemical standards with qualitative evidence from the pharmaceutical, industrial chemical, and pesticide sectors, my book shows that companies have leveraged product safety information to win stricter standards on less profitable products for which they have a more profitable alternative. Companies have additionally supported regulatory institutions that, while intended to protect the public, also help companies use information to eliminate less profitable products more systematically, creating barriers to commerce that disproportionally disadvantage developing countries. These dynamics not only play out domestically but also internationally, under organizations charged with providing objective regulatory recommendations. The result is the global legitimization of biased regulatory rules.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“The Politics of Rejection: Explaining Chinese Import Refusals” (with Sung Eun Kim and Grace Zeng) - EarlyView at American Journal of Political Science [Ungated version]
Health and safety standards offer a convenient means by which governments can credibly claim to be protecting the population, even while pursuing less publicly-oriented goals. In the realm of international trade, such regulatory standards have most often been studied as a method of veiled protectionism that can help nations privilege domestic industry while skirting World Trade Organization requirements of openness. Yet precisely because health and safety standards create ambiguity about their intent and are therefore difficult to punish, nations may be incentivized to use them for goals that extend well beyond protecting domestic industry. In particular, we theorize that governments will, at times, use regulatory barriers as a means of coercive diplomacy. In order to show this, we collect comprehensive data on import refusals by Chinese border inspectors between 2011 and 2019. Though ostensibly intended to keep dangerous products out of the hands of Chinese consumers, we demonstrate that import rejections have systematically been used by the Chinese government as a way to punish states that act against China's interest.
“Extreme Weather Events and The Politics of Climate Change Attribution” [open access] 2022. Science Advances 8(36). (with Zuhad Hai)
The consequences of climate change are becoming increasingly visible in the form of more severe wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. As the science linking these disasters to climate change has grown more robust, it has led to pressure on politicians to acknowledge the connection. While an analysis of U.S. Congressional press releases reveals a slight increase in politicians’ willingness to do so, many remain hesitant. Why? We hypothesize that climate change attribution can backfire, harming politicians’ popularity and undermining their ability to adapt to the visible manifestations of climate change. We conduct an original survey experiment on a representative sample of American adults and show that when a politician links wildfires to climate change, Republicans perceive the official as less capable of addressing weather-related disasters. In addition, Republicans become less supportive of efforts to protect against similar disasters in the future. Our findings shed light on the potential trade-offs of conveying the link between climate change and its impacts.
“Covert Confiscation: How Governments Differ in Their Strategies of Expropriation.” 2022, Comparative Political Studies 56(1): 3-35. (with Jane Esberg) [Ungated version]
A substantial literature concludes that democratic-type institutions curb governments’ propensity to expropriate foreign direct investment. However, little attention has been paid to the strategies of expropriation regimes employ. We theorize that more politically constrained regimes will utilize expropriation methods that help them overcome institutional impediments. Using data on expropriations in developing countries between 1960 and 2014, we show that rather than rely on the most direct and overt forms of expropriation, constrained regimes tend to use more indirect and covert methods, such as forced sale or contract renegotiation, tools which can be harder to identify, easier to justify, and frequently face lower legislative approval hurdles. Indeed, while more politically constrained regimes are less likely to overtly expropriate foreign investment than less constrained regimes, they are nearly as likely to do so covertly, introducing new questions about the extent to which institutional constraints really translate into improved protections for foreign investors.
“The Domestic Impact of International Standards.” 2020. International Studies Quarterly 64(3): 600-608. [Ungated version]
Regulation is no longer purely a domestic affair. International standards now exist across a broad range of regulatory arenas, touching on issues that may be central to domestic values, such as the regulation of health, safety, and the environment. Although a number of studies have looked at the domestic impact of globalization more generally, few scholars have evaluated the effects of international standards, specifically. This paper investigates that issue, with an empirical focus on agrochemicals. Using original data on changes to US agrochemical regulations between 1996 and 2015, I evaluate whether and how domestic rules have changed in response to international standards. Contrary to common fears, I find little evidence that international standards primarily act as a ceiling, thereby undermining domestic regulations. Instead, international standards seem to serve as focal points, pulling nations toward leniency as well as toward stringency. These findings not only contribute to the broader literature on the domestic effects of globalization, but they also allay concerns that international standards could act as a regulatory cap, encouraging nations to sacrifice caution for economic gain.
"For Safety or Profit? How Science Serves the Strategic Interests of Private Actors." [open access] 2020. American Journal of Political Science 64(2): 293-308.
Science is central to the regulation of risk. But who provides the science on which risk regulations are based? Through an in-depth empirical analysis of domestic health and safety standards, this article shows how private actors use scientific information to acquire preferential outcomes. I develop a formal model delineating conditions under which firms will seek stricter standards on their own products, and I reveal how companies can acquire these outcomes through the strategic provision of information. To test the theory, I track changes to U.S. agrochemical standards over a two-decade period. I also introduce firm-level petition data and historical evidence to test the mechanism directly. My findings provide new insight into the strategies companies use to benefit from regulations, while also forcing us to reevaluate what it means for regulations to be based on science.
“The Political Economy of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: An Exploratory Analysis.” 2018. Journal of Legal Analysis 9(2): 153-182. (with Alan Sykes)
Critics of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) have frequently claimed that it puts U.S. firms at a competitive disadvantage. This critique suggests that the beneficiaries of FCPA enforcement are foreign competitors of U.S. firms, and foreign economies that suffer fewer of the inefficiencies associated with corruption. Yet enforcement of the Act has increased dramatically since it first passed in the post-Watergate, anti-corruption era. If the FCPA really promotes foreign interests over the interests of U.S. firms doing business abroad, and if there are no obvious domestic beneficiaries of aggressive enforcement, why have domestic business interests been unable to push back successfully against growing enforcement? This article suggests several reasons why the adverse effects of FCPA enforcement on U.S. business may be considerably smaller than some FCPA critics suggest, and why significant numbers of U.S. firms may actually benefit from enforcement. Our hypotheses find support in Congressional testimony, business surveys, and interviews with prominent FCPA practitioners and compliance officers.
Working Papers
“To Mitigate or Adapt? The Role of Climate Vulnerability on Policy Preferences” (with Richard Clark and Talbot Andrews) - email for latest draft
Climate change is projected to significantly increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events such as wildfires, hurricanes, and floods. Prior research indicates that exposure to such events can make individuals more supportive of green policies. But we know less about how vulnerability to extreme weather shapes individuals’ preferences for mitigation (emissions reductions) relative to adaptation (community resilience). Given that governments are budget constrained and individuals have limited thresholds for taxation, policymakers often confront a tradeoff between these climate policy goals. We leverage two waves of original survey experiments fielded in the United States (n = 4,000) to understand how the public weighs adaptation versus mitigation. Our results indicate that individuals more vulnerable to extreme weather events place a higher premium on adaptation relative to mitigation – especially when they possess weaker priors about climate change ex ante. We show this only holds when adaptation stands to directly benefit respondents by insulating them from the worst effects of climate disasters common to their region. In contrast, these same individuals show little inclination to invest in adaptation that benefits other communities. These findings shed light on the pressures faced by policymakers on climate policy in one of the world’s largest emitting countries and underscore the challenges of mobilizing broad support for mitigation.
“Harmonizing Safety: The Politics of Occupational Exposure Limits in the EU” (with Christina Toenshoff)
When countries with divergent regulations decide to coordinate on a set of safety standards, whose standards win out, and why? We study this through an investigation of the EU’s efforts to standardize occupational exposure limits — rules dictating allowable levels of chemicals in work environments. We introduce extensive historical data that allow us to observe the standards individual European nations had in place prior to the start of the EU standardization process. Combining this data with information on chemical uses, trade levels, and risk profiles while also leveraging numerous interviews conducted with those who have been directly involved in the EU standard-setting process over the past three decades, we seek to answer the following questions: 1) Which standards are selected for harmonization in the first place, and why? 2) Who exerts the most influence on the standard-setting process, and under what conditions are they particularly influential? We demonstrate that international standards are most likely to be put in place not only when there is a public safety need but also when more countries expect the standards to improve their competitive positions. In addition, we show that when it comes to international standard-setting, information is power, yet this power is applied most forcefully or, at least, most effectively, when countries have a greater economic interest in leveraging it.