Synopsis

In this article that was published by World Trade Review, I explain how the expansion of the Information Technology Agreement, the most successful attempt at trade liberalization under the auspices of the WTO since its inception in 1995, was agreed to. I then discuss the lessons the ITA expansion suggest for other  ongoing plurilateral trade negotiations such as the Environmental Goods Agreement. The full version of the paper can be found here.

In this article for the Journal of Law, Technology, and Policy, we examine how digitalization is expanding the trade in services, how businesses and government are shaping and reacting to the newly forming international law in this area, and what governments can do to promote further regulatory cooperation in the trade in digital services. The full version of this paper can be found here.

My co-author for this paper was Taylor Phillips, who was an undergraduate at Middlebury College when we wrote it together. 

In this article in Global Governance, I provide a conceptualization of different pathways for promoting global commerce-facilitating regulatory cooperation. Governments can try to unilaterally impose their position, negotiate binding agreements, promote mutual recognition, utilize networked governance, create private standards, rely on business self-regulation, or not pursue cooperation. Each of these choices has implications for commerce and international relations on that issue, so the choice of policy route is of vital importance. This article, which can be found here, builds on lobbying, regulation, and trade scholarship to explain how states choose a pathway.

Whereas tariffs were once the main barrier to international trade, cross-national differences in regulation now constitute the most significant impediment to trade and are therefore the centerpiece issues in contemporary trade negotiations. In this article published in Journal of World Trade, I explain how that change occurred and what that means for multinational corporations, civil society groups, and the politics of international trade.

In this chapter of Research Handbook on Trade Wars, edited by Wei Liang and Ka Zeng, I analyze trade-related intellectual property disputes between the United States and China to explain how regulatory disputes can escalate into broader trade wars. I specifically look at three cases: audiovisuals, copyright, and forced technology transfer. 

This volume was just released in July 2022. I will put a link here once I am contractually allowed to post the chapter online.

In this chapter of A Research Agenda for International Political Economy, edited by David Deese, I explain how ongoing technological changes are driving economic concentration, how this phenomenon better explains the decline in manufacturing employment than the China Shock, and how this is an important driver of populism, but conclude with a brief discussion of how work-from-home may be pushing back against this trend. 

This volume was just released in October 2022. I will put a link here once I am contractually allowed to post the chapter online.

In this article published in The World Economy, which can be found here, I use three case studies to analyze how the public opinion environment shapes party competition over trade policy: reactions to China after Tiananmen Square, negotiations over NAFTA, and the 2001 Congressional vote on Trade Promotion Authority in 2001.

In this chapter of Terms of Trade: Making Sense of World Trade Politics, I trace the contours of the political fight over the meaning and uses of the term 'protectionism' between export-oriented businesses and government officials who want an expansive understanding of that term and activists, import-competitors, and different government officials that want the term protectionism to have a very narrow definition. The chapter traces the political development of the trade regime through the politics around the term 'protectionism.'

I am currently working on a book on the relationship between the five biggest technology firms and their populist critics. I am also working on article length projects on capitalism-friendly environmentalism, intellectual property regulations surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines, and policy facilitations of work-from-home. 

 Spurred on by populists in both parties, Congress is considering a range of bills that would radically remake American antitrust policy in the name of reining in Big Tech. In this paper, I argue that passing these bills would be a serious mistake.  While there are reasonable criticisms of the Big Tech firms to be made, a close examination of the facts and evidence related to antitrust show that the case for this big revision of competition policy is actually quite weak.