We argue that economic links, such as supply chains, can create a common roof that protects foreign investors in host countries that lack strong institutions to protect property rights. Supply chains link the activities of firms: when a host government breaks a contract with one firm, other firms in the supply chain are harmed. These partner firms therefore have incentive to protect one another’s property rights. This leads to the key implication of our argument: host governments are less likely to violate the property rights of firms that are more tightly linked with other firms in the host economy. We test our argument with cross-national data on investment arbitration, a survey of US multinational subsidiaries in Russia, and case studies from Azerbaijan. Our findings imply that one benefit of outsourcing in developing and transition economies is the creation of a network of partner firms that protect each other’s property rights.

How do domestic and global factors shape governments’ capacity to issue debt in primary capital markets? Consistent with the ‘democratic advantage’, we identify domestic institutional mechanisms, including executive constraints and policy transparency, that facilitate debt issuance rather than electoral events. Most importantly, we argue that the democratic advantage is contingent: investors’ attention to domestic politics varies with conditions in global capital markets. When global financial liquidity is low, investors are risk-averse, and political risk constrains governments’ capacity to borrow. But when global markets are flush, investors are risk-tolerant and less sensitive to political risk. We support our argument with new data on 245,000 government bond issues in primary capital markets – the point at which governments’ costs of market access matter most – for 131 sovereign issuers (1990–2016). In doing so, we highlight the role of systemic factors, which are under-appreciated in much ‘open economy politics’ research, in determining access to capital markets.

A backlash against Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), in which multinational corporations can sue governments, has led some states to unilaterally withdraw from some of the thousands of investment treaties that facilitate ISDS. But thanks to redundancies in the dense, decentralized network of investment treaties, states can reject some treaty commitments to ISDS and maintain most (if not all) international legal protections for foreign investors. In this article, we explain the source of redundancies, document the group of states that have taken advantage of unilateral withdrawal, and demonstrate that states can recalibrate their international legal commitments without eschewing contemporary international investment law.

Systematic data about investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) are increasingly important to our understanding of modern relations between states and multinational corporations. This article updates Susan Franck's 'Empirically Evaluating Claims about Investment Treaty Arbitration' (2007) and complements Thomas Schultz and Cedric Dupont's 'Investment Arbitration: Promoting the Rule of Law or Over-empowering Investors? A Quantitative Empirical Study' (2015). I use a political science lens to explore data on the modern incarnation of ISDS, from 1990 to 2014. The article addresses topics including: (i) the industry, nationality and other characteristics of arbitration filers; (ii) win, loss, settlement and annulment rates; and (iii) trends in amounts claimed and amounts awarded. It also serves to introduce the accompanying data set. A central takeaway is that users of the de facto ISDS regime are incredibly diverse. Nonetheless, both proponents and detractors of ISDS may find fodder for their positions in recent developments.

We often presume that international financial actors have the same preferences, but this paper asks whether the property rights of foreign direct investors matter to sovereign bondholders. When governments expropriate direct investors, different investors' preferences could align over property rights issues. However, bondholders likely take positive signals if expropriation generates revenue for the state. Using a novel data set (1995–2011), I find that governments that earn revenue from expropriation can enjoy lower long‐term spreads on sovereign bonds. Although governments that expropriate lose out on FDI, they can benefit by generating revenue and enjoying rewards in sovereign debt markets. Unpacking investor preferences thus reveals gaps in market‐based informal property rights enforcement. When bondholders' and direct investors' preferences conflict, governments gain space to prioritize other goals over the protection of private property.