Research

Peer-Reviewed

Tightening or Loosening? The Effects of Uncertainty on the Design of Preferential Trade Agreements (with Leopoldo Biffi). World Trade Review, 25 (2) , pp.223 - 245, 2026. L. Alan Winters Prize, World Trade Review Editorial Board

  • To mitigate uncertainty, it is often assumed that governments negotiate ample flexibility provisions when entering new international treaties. Yet, the case of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) suggests that governments prioritize more stringent commitments when faced with uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate the effects of uncertainty spikes occurring during negotiations on the design of 251 bilateral PTAs. Our theory proposes that sharp increases in uncertainty make governments more prone to signing deeper PTAs to showcase their commitment to liberalization. In doing so, governments cater to firms’ demands for institutions protecting investment, upholding intellectual property rights, and promoting regulatory harmonization. We find robust evidence that PTAs are deeper when the contracting parties are faced with uncertainty spikes during negotiations. However, we do not find equally consistent evidence that countries also make PTAs more flexible. While much of the rational-design literature has focused on flexibility as a tool to cope with uncertainty, our findings suggest that countries rather tend to tighten their international commitments in turbulent times.

Global Value Chains: The Road to Resilience (with Selina Hauser and Israel Gutierrez). In: M. Elsig, R. Polanco and K. Claussen (Eds), The Concept Design of 21st Century Trade Agreements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2025.

  • Global value chains (GVCs) are a key pillar of the trade environment today. Over the last few decades, trade in intermediates, trade in value-added, and trade network complexity have significantly increased. First, we give a brief historical perspective on the evolution of GVCs and elaborate on some recent shocks to GVCs and how they caused shortages and disruptions in the globalised production network. Second, we outline different strategies to make GVCs more resilient and discuss the theoretical justification for government involvement. Third, we discuss the relationship between PTAs and GVCs by providing a detailed analysis of the existing channels through which PTAs can enhance the resilience of supply chains. Fourth, we propose three additional approaches that could further increase GVCs' resilience and inform the future design of PTAs. Finally, we conclude the chapter by summarising our findings and pointing to further research avenues on the link between PTAs and GVCs' resilience.

Sweetening the Liberalization Pill: Flanking Measures to Free Trade Agreements (with Noémie Laurens and Cédric Dupont). Review of International Political Economy, 31(6), pp.1919-1936, 2024.

  • Free trade agreement (FTA) negotiators increasingly face pressure from domestic interest groups, including environmental NGOs, civil activists, and labor unions. As a result of the growing scrutiny on the content of FTAs, we are now witnessing a proliferation of instruments accompanying FTAs, which we group under the label of “flanking measures.” In this paper, we argue that flanking measures can serve two main non-exclusive purposes: increasing aggregate social welfare by mitigating the negative spillovers of FTAs on society (the substantive dimension) and helping to build domestic coalitions in support of trade liberalization (the political dimension). Despite the relevance and growing empirical importance of the concept, flanking remains largely overlooked in the IPE literature. This essay seeks to fill this gap by discussing the scope, purposes, and timing of flanking.

Working Papers

Protection for Innovation: Firms and the Politics of Non-Tariff Measures (R&R International Organization).

— IPE Best Graduate Student Paper Award, International Studies Association (ISA)

  • In the shadow of tariff wars, non-tariff measures (NTMs) have become the most prevalent barrier to global trade in recent decades. However, we still know little about the corporate drivers behind these measures. This paper offers a new theory of regulatory protection that explains how firms' innovative capabilities shape their stance on technical NTMs. It argues that firms making significant R\&D investments seek NTMs as a means of (i) reducing effective innovation costs, (ii) supporting the commercialisation of innovation, and (iii) creating competitive advantages by raising rivals' costs. To test the argument, I construct a novel dataset on firm-level support for U.S. technical NTMs imposed between 2003 and 2024, complemented by corporate financial statements and lobbying data on traditional trade policies. I find that innovative firms are significantly more supportive of NTMs than their less innovative rivals. Support for regulatory protection is particularly strong in highly competitive product markets where foreign rivals threaten the monopoly rents from innovation. Moreover, the results suggest that firms strategically combine support for open markets with demands for targeted protection. Firms that advocate for trade agreements and tariff reductions are also more likely to seek regulatory protection through NTMs. These findings shed light on firms' multidimensional policy preferences and challenge the view of large, innovative firms as reliable champions of globalization.

Multilateralism without Enforcement: Trade Concerns and Geopolitical Rebalancing at the WTO, 1995–2024 (with Yueyi Li).

  • What happens to multilateral governance when enforcement breaks down? We study the collapse of the WTO Appellate Body and shift attention from formal disputes to trade concerns — public, non-binding challenges to another government's policies — voiced in WTO committees. We transform fragmented records from five WTO bodies into linked data on 1,913 concerns and 30,160 member-level interventions from 1995 to 2024. Using LLM-assisted, expert-validated coding, we recover the products, policies, actor roles, coalitions, and frames involved and connect them to product-level trade and legal trajectories. Our data uncover a large domain of multilateral contestation that previous research missed. In contrast to formal litigation, committee activity did not collapse after 2019. Instead, concerns remained active longer and generated more repeated interventions, while agenda-setting became concentrated among fewer states. Traditional Western members withdrew, while emerging powers became more active, and power asymmetry increasingly constrained weaker governments’ willingness to challenge stronger targets. The results reveal an important form of institutional adaptation: when legalization recedes, multilateralism can persist through lower-cost monitoring, public contestation, and coalition-building. Our data opens a new window onto trade conflict, allowing us to trace how commercial interests and political relations shape contestation before, beyond, and instead of formal litigation.

Adapt or Resist? Firm Responses to Geoeconomic Action (with Denis Anwar).

  • When does corporate power constrain geoeconomic escalation? Firms exposed to an adversary’s economic coercion may support retaliation, but they may also become a brake on escalation when further confrontation threatens to deepen their losses. We argue that whether exposed firms mobilize politically for restraint depends on their adaptive capacity. Firms with greater capacity to substitute inputs, redesign production, or innovate around restrictions can absorb the initial shock through economic adjustment; similarly exposed firms without such options are more likely to seek a political solution by opposing further escalation. We test this argument using China’s export controls on critical minerals in 2023 and 2024, which generated heterogeneous shocks across U.S. firms according to their pre-existing mineral dependence. Combining novel measures of mineral exposure and adaptive capacity with LobbyView records, Section 232 submissions, and earnings calls from around 6,000 publicly traded firms, we examine whether and how firms mobilize politically in response to geoeconomic confrontation. We find that highly exposed firms with low adaptive capacity are more likely to lobby and oppose further geoeconomic action, while similarly exposed firms with greater adaptive capacity are less likely to mobilize. Our findings identify firms as an important domestic constraint on geoeconomic escalation and show how the firms weakest at adapting economically may be strongest in constraining escalation politically.

Signing, Flanking, or Renegotiating Trade Agreements? How the European Commission Navigates Ratification Uncertainty (with Cédric Dupont and Noémie Laurens).

  • The adoption of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) in the European Union (EU) involves a dual challenge: reaching a negotiated outcome and subsequently securing its signature and ratification. While the firs challenge has been extensively studied, the period between the conclusion of negotiations and the signature of PTAs deserves closer examination, as obstacles to ratification often emerge only after the negotiating process has ended. This paper investigates how the European Commission responds to such post-negotiation uncertainty. We argue that the Commission pursues one of three strategies: 1) submitting the agreement for signature without modification when uncertainty is low; 2) attaching flanking instruments to alleviate opposition when uncertainty is high; or 3) reopening negotiations when flanking measures prove insufficient. These strategies are illustrated through a comparative analysis of three cases. The EU–Japan Economic Partnership Agreement constitutes a low-uncertainty scenario and was signed with minimal delay or controversy, consistent with the first strategy. By contrast, both the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement and the EU–Mercosur Agreement faced significant domestic and international contestation. In both cases, the Commission deployed additional instruments to address concerns, in line with the second strategy. However, in the case of the EU–Mercosur Agreement, these efforts failed to satisfy Member State and civil society objections, leading to a reopening of negotiations. In sum, this paper offers new insights into the Commission’s strategic agency in navigating ratification challenges and contributes to a more systematic understanding of post-negotiation dynamics in EU trade policymaking.

Work-in-Progress

The Politics of Green Trade Regulation: How Firms, NGOs, and Think Tanks Fight for Influence

Policy Briefs & Others

The Remaking of the Global Trading Order: The Search for a New Compass (with Cédric Dupont). Kofi Annan Foundation, Issue Brief No 5, Democracy and Trade, 2025.

Sustainability Standards which Work for All: How Trade Policy Can Protect Forests and Livelihoods (with Arianna Bondi). G20 Brazil, Policy Brief, TF04, 2024.

Zur Diskussion der Effekte Künstlicher Intelligenz in der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Literatur (with Christoph Menzel). BMWi, Diskussionspapier Nr. 8. 2018.