Competition laws have become a mainstay of regulation in market economies today. At the same time, past efforts to study the drivers or effects of these laws have been hampered by the lack of systematic measures of these laws across a wide range of years or countries. In this paper, we draw on new data on the evolution of competition laws to create a novel Competition Law Index (the "CLI") that measures the stringency of competition regulation from 1889 to 2010. We then employ the CLI to examine trends in the intensity of competition regulation over time and across key countries. We also use our data to create several alternative indexes of competition law that may be appropriate for specific research applications. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate how the CLI can facilitate new empirical research on comparative and international competition law.

A great deal of political economy scholarship has focused on how countries can attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and the effects of FDI on growth and political stability. A related topic that has received almost no attention, however, is that of divergent political reactions to inflows of FDI in the countries receiving investments. This is an oversight, because inward FDI flows are not equally welcomed by the host country and, in fact, often encounter strong political opposition. We study this phenomenon by examining political opposition to attempts by Chinese companies at mergers and acquisitions (M&As) with US firms. This is especially important given rapidly expanding Chinese M&A activity. We hypothesise that although most legal barriers to foreign M&As are based on national security considerations, objections on these grounds are often vehicles through which to channel other grievances, and that economic distress and reciprocity are also key drivers of political opposition. To test this theory, we constructed an original dataset of 569 transactions that occurred between 1999 and 2014 involving Chinese acquirers and American targets. We find that there is more likely to be opposition to Chinese M&A attempts in security sensitive industries, economically distressed industries, and sectors in which US companies faced restrictions in China's M&A markets.

Prior international political economy public opinion research has primarily examined how economic and socio-cultural factors shape individuals’ views on the flows of goods, people and capital. This research has largely ignored whether individuals also care about rewarding or punishing foreign countries for their policies on these issues. We tested this possibility by administering a series of conjoint and traditional survey experiments in the United States and China that examined how reciprocity influences opposition to foreign acquisitions of domestic companies. We find that reciprocity is an important determinant of public opinion on the regulation of foreign investments. This suggests the need to consider the policies that other countries adopt when trying to explain public attitudes toward global economic integration.

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Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, we know little about whether any constitutional rights actually improve rights in practice. We test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that "organizational" rights increase de facto rights protection, because they create organizations with the incentives and means to protect the underlying right. By contrast, individual rights are unlikely to make a difference. To test our theory, we use a recently developed identification strategy that mitigates selection bias by incorporating previously unobserved information on countries' preferences for constitutional rights into the research design. Specifically, we use data on constitutional rights adoption since 1946 to calculate countries' yearly constitutional ideal point, and then match on the probability that a country will protect a specific right in its constitution. Our results suggest that only organizational rights are associated with increased de facto rights protection. We thank Kevin Cope, Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, Jake Gersen, Jeff Lax, Eric Posner, Emilia Justyna Powell, Fred Schauer, Beth Simmons, and Adrian Vermeule for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Special thanks to Yonathan Lupu for sharing code and for many helpful suggestions on the implementation of our identification strategy. We thank Sean Roberts for excellent research assistance. Keywords

Competition law has proliferated around the world. Due to data limitations, however, there is little systematic information about the substance and enforcement of these laws. In this article, we address that problem by introducing two new datasets on competition law regimes around the world. First, we introduce the Comparative Competition Law Dataset, which codes competition laws in 131 jurisdictions between 1889 to 2010. Second, we introduce the Comparative Competition Enforcement Dataset, which provides data on competition agencies’ resources and activities in 100 jurisdictions between 1990 and 2010. These datasets offer the most comprehensive picture of competition law yet assembled and provide a new foundation for empirical research on the legal regimes used to regulate markets.

A BS T R AC TThe ideology of American lawyers has been a persistent source of discussion and debate. Two obstacles, however, have prevented this topic from being systematically studied: the sheer number of attorneys in the USA and the need for a methodology that makes comparing the ideology of specific individuals possible. In this article, we present a comprehensive mapping of lawyers' ideologies that has overcome these hurdles. We use a new dataset that links the largest database of political ideology with the largest database of lawyers' identities to complete the most extensive analysis of the political ideology of American lawyers ever conducted.

Law professors routinely accuse each other of making politically biased arguments in their scholarship. They have also helped produce a large empirical literature on judicial behavior that has found that judicial opinions sometimes reflect the ideological biases of the judges who join them. Yet no one has used statistical methods to test the parallel hypothesis that legal scholarship reflects the political biases of law professors. This paper provides the results of such a test. We find that, at a statistically significant level, law professors at elite law schools who make donations to Democratic political candidates write liberal scholarship, and law professors who make donations to Republican political candidates write conservative scholarship. These findings raise questions about standards of objectivity in legal scholarship.