This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

How do geopolitical forces influence international capital markets? In particular, do market actors condition their responses to crisis lending initiatives on the political incentives of major lenders? In this paper, Randall Stone and co-writers Terrence Chapman, Songying Fang and Xin Li  analyze a formal model which demonstrates that the effect of crisis lending announcements on international investment flows is conditional on how market actors interpret the political and economic motivations behind lending decisions on the part of the lender and borrower. If investors believe the decision to accept crisis lending is a sign of economic weakness and lending decisions are influenced by the political interests of the major donor countries, then crisis lending may not reduce borrowing costs or quell fears of international investors. On the other hand, if market actors believe that crisis lending programs, and attendant austerity conditions, will significantly reduce the risk of a financial crisis, they may respond with increased private investment, creating a "catalytic effect."  In this model, the political biases of key lending countries can affect the inferences market actors draw, because some sovereign lenders have strategic interests in ensuring that certain borrowing countries do not collapse under the strain of economic crisis. Although this theory applies to multiple types of crisis lending, it helps explain discrepant empirical findings about market reactions to IMF programs. The implications of their theory is tested by examining how sovereign bond yields are affected by IMF program announcements, loan size, the scope of conditions attached to loans, and measures of the geopolitical interests of the United States, a key IMF principal.

Randall Stone (Ph.D. 1993, Harvard) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Rochester.  His research is in international political economy and combines formal theory, quantitative methods, and qualitative fieldwork.  He is the author of Controlling Institutions:  International Organizations and the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press 2011), Lending Credibility:  The International Monetary Fund and the Post-Communist Transition (Princeton University Press, 2002) and Satellites and Commissars:  Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade  (Princeton University Press, 1996), as well as articles in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Review of International Organizations, and Global Environmental Politics.  He has been awarded grants by the NSF, SSRC, NCEEER, and IREX, was the last recipient of the Soviet Peace Prize (1991), and has been a Senior Fulbright Scholar visiting the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Berlin.  He speaks German and Russian fluently and Polish moderately well, and reads all Slavic languages. 

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), if successful, will eliminate trade barriers between the US and the EU, both of which already have free trade agreements with many other countries, including several that are in FTAs with both (Canada, Korea, Mexico to name just a few).  Is TTIP therefore achieving true free trade with this larger group?  No. Restrictive rules of origin apply, and these can potentially interfere with trade and reduce welfare even when compared to a world without any of these FTAs.

Alan V. Deardorff is John W. Sweetland Professor of International Economics and Professor of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.  With a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, he has been on the faculty at the University of Michigan since 1970, where he has served as Chair of Economics and now Associate Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.  His research has included both contributions to the theory of international trade and, with Robert M. Stern, development of the Michigan Model of World Production of Trade, used for analysis of multi-country, multi-sector changes in trade policy.

The process of joining an IO may cause liberalization before membership. Thus studies that only evaluate compliance after membership underestimate the effects. Conditional membership may be one of the most important sources of leverage for IOs.  The rule-makers establish rules that don't go far beyond what they would otherwise do, but rule-takers often must accept a broad range of policy reforms they would not otherwise consider. The influence of accession conditions has been studied in the context of EU and NATO, where sizeable benefits and formal conditions motivate major concessions by applicants. This paper proposes to examine a much less powerful organization, the OECD. Here the qualifications for membership are ambiguous and leave open room for informal pressure for a range of economic reforms. The politics of joining organizations touch closely on concerns about status and legitimacy as well as functional demands for cooperation in complex issue areas. I will examine how OECD membership has motivated specific reforms in regulatory policies and trade in a comparison of the East European transition economies accession with that of Japan, Mexico, and Korea. Statistical analysis of patterns of when countries apply for membership will test for the role of economic and political conditions as well as the political relations among members.

This event is being presented in partnership with CDDRL, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Hoover Institution, and a student led movement to end atrocities at Stanford (STAND).

Abstract:

Sixty-eight years after the Holocaust, governments continue to struggle with preventing genocide and mass atrocities. In 2005, United Nations member states agreed that nations share a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing. Join us for a discussion about how the responsibility to protect (or R2P) has been applied in recent crises.

Speakers bio:

Richard Williamson is a nonresident senior fellow in Foreign Policy at Brookings and a principal in the consulting firm Salisbury Strategies LLP. His work focuses on human rights, multilateral diplomacy, nuclear nonproliferation and post-conflict reconstruction. Prior to those positions, Mr. Williamson served as U.S. special envoy to Sudan, under President George W. Bush. Earlier in the Bush administration, Mr. Williamson, who has broad foreign policy and negotiating experience, served as ambassador to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs, and as ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Previously, Mr. Williamson served in several other senior foreign policy positions under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, including as assistant secretary of state for international organizations at the Department of State, and as an assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

Michael Abramowitz is director of the Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He joined the Museum in 2009 after nearly 25 years at the Washington Post, where he served as White House correspondent and previously as national editor, helping supervise coverage of national politics, the federal government, social policy, and national security. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a non-resident fellow of the German Marshall Fund. He was also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Tod Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, based in Hoover’s Washington, DC, office. His areas of research are political theory, international relations, national security policy, and US politics. 

Lindberg is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and an adjunct associate professor at Georgetown University, where he teaches in the School of Foreign Service. From 1999 until it ceased publication in 2013, he was editor of the bimonthly journal Policy Review.

In 2007–8, Lindberg served as head of the expert group on international norms and institutions of the Genocide Prevention Task Force, a joint project of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. In 2005, Lindberg was the coordinator for the group Preventing and Responding to Genocide and Major Human Rights Abuses for the United States Institute of Peace's Task Force on the United Nations. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Princeton Project on National Security, for which he served as cochair of the working group on anti-Americanism. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Lina Khatib is the co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, was a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School. 

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