The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored emerging vulnerabilities in the US research and development (R&D) ecosystem. While an open and collaborative environment has been essential for advancing R&D, this approach exposes university-based R&D to a variety of security threats including state-supported efforts, attacks by malicious actors, and insufficient internal mitigation. As the pandemic led to more remote work and online collaboration, the incidence of exploitation has expanded. Increased security measures are needed to insulate and protect the R&D ecosystem, and US innovation more broadly, while maintaining the fundamental qualities that have contributed to its historical success. In this article, we present the Research Integrity Security Certification (RISC) framework. This concept preserves the autonomy of the US higher education system while also suggesting a mechanism whose effect would be a general enhancement of the security of the US university R&D enterprise with minimal additional state involvement. Much of the work in the proposed model is done by market mechanisms and self-interested microeconomic calculations that generate beneficial aggregate effects. The RISC framework modernizes the university R&D enterprise while strengthening it to operate in this evolving security environment.

The global financial crisis of 2008, its following bank bailouts, and associated corporate impunity sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the structural power of business and the question of “who rules?” in capitalist societies. This new wave of scholarship mitigated some of the problems of the original, theory-driven discussions from the 1970s and 1980s. But despite significant advancements in the empirical identification of business power, we lack a unified framework for studying its working mechanisms. So-called hybrid approaches, drawing on instrumental and structural power for their analyses, display high potential for such a unified and easily applicable framework. We build on this hybrid tradition and propose a novel model that integrates instrumental and structural power analysis into a basic framework. With this, we recalibrate the often rigid division between instrumental and structural power forms and emphasize the role of perceptions as key for understanding the dynamics of business power over time. We illustrate this parsimonious framework by an analysis of the plans of the Dutch government to abolish a dividend tax in 2018 that would have benefited a number of large multinationals but collapsed before implementation.

Do perceived obstacles about corruption matter for Indian firms when it comes to their probability to innovate? Using World Bank Enterprise Survey firm-level data, we show that a unit rise in corruption perception of firms in India lowers innovation rate by about 1 percent. The result is important in terms of policy implementation because recent studies have shown that perceived obstacles can affect firms’ probability to innovate. Such analysis is missing in the Indian context where both big and petty corruption is rampant. Our results further show that perceptions about financial barriers matter only when firms also view corruption to be bad. Perceived difficulty in accessing credit in conjunction with corruption perception lowers probability of innovation by 4 percent. This is also true for nonfinancial perceived obstacles of firms. The results remain robust to alternate identification strategies.

Why do business leaders support or oppose interstate wars? This article clarifies and empirically illustrates two competing perspectives on the sources of business war preferences: the opinions businesses have about interstate conflict. Namely, while an “economic consequences” perspective argues that business war preferences stem primarily from the economic effects of interstate conflicts, a “leader ideology” perspective predicts that business leaders’ domestic policy preferences and political ideology will determine their war preferences. I reexamine historical survey data on American business leaders’ opinions about the Vietnam War using item response theory scaling and regression analysis and find support for both perspectives. These results point toward the importance of further theoretical and empirical research on the sources of business war preferences, so I propose a structured, forward-looking research agenda on business war preferences based on different conceptualizations of businesses, their motivations, and the consequences of interstate conflicts.

Our selection and endogeneity corrected findings suggest that firms' political connections negatively influence their market value. We find that firms with a larger size, more operationally efficient in utilizing their assets, and those operating in more concentrated industries benefit more from the political connections than the otherwise corresponding firms. We also report that political connections do not influence firms' leverage choices. However, we find that politically connected firms with higher leverage have significantly lower market value. Further, we note that political connections help the firms operating in unregulated but more concentrated industries, probably to obtain ‘private benefits’, leading to their higher market value. Overall, our results indicate that the effect of political connections is not homogeneous across the sample firms. They also raise questions on the motivation of sample firms' political connections, suggesting that these firms probably obtain political connections for reasons other than enhancing their market value.

Some protrade business interests that are against hard enforcement of labor and environmental provisions in trade deals may end up eventually supporting it, while others stick to their initial opposition. Why? When will their positions change? The existing literature would expect protrade interests to be more or less in favor of non-trade issues in trade policies according to how dependent on the international economy they are. However, longitudinal variation in export- and import-dependence does not suffice to explain change of the sort I am interested in. I argue that the position of protrade business interests change as they accumulate experiences on the negotiation/ratification of trade deals. To probe that argument, I present two paired comparisons analyzing the position of protrade business interests as pertains to the use of sanctions to enforce labor and environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) signed by Canada and Australia, and by the United States (US) and European Union (EU) between 1993 and 2019. My analysis points to the overall plausibility of my hypothesis and to avenues for future research. The paper helps understand the political activity of business interests on trade and sustainable development and can shed new light on the politics behind the design of social and environmental provisions in PTAs.