This paper examines the influence of three different forms of global economic engagement on the lobbying behavior of US businesses with regard to trade relations with China: (a) input sourcing; (b) downstream export; and (c) vertical foreign direct investment. It will be hypothesized that firms involved in all three forms of global economic activities should have incentives to lobby over China-related trade issues in order to maintain unimpeded access to sources of supply or markets and to ensure the smooth operation of the entire supply chain. Going further, drawing on the exit-voice framework developed by Albert Hirschman (1972), it will be argued that compared to firms in those industries mainly involved in input sourcing from China, American multinational corporations that have verticalized their production should have even stronger incentives to engage in lobbying activities and “voice” their policy preferences due to their greater “sunk costs” and hence the higher cost of “exit.” Statistical analysis of the China trade-related lobbying activities of US firms between 2006 and 2016 lends substantial support to these conjectures.

In the competition between American states for economic development, about half of American states offer lower levels of labor rights in the form of “right-to-work” (RTW) laws. RTW states often tout their advantages in competing for foreign investment, but do foreign companies really want weaker labor regulation? Many foreign firms locate production in the United States not to lower labor costs but for other reasons, such as proximity to consumers or to employ highly skilled workers, implying that differences across labor regulations within rich countries may be declining in importance. In this article, we investigate the relationship between RTW laws and greenfield foreign direct investments. In particular, we explore recent RTW changes across two states, Indiana and Michigan, controlling for national trends in foreign investment. Adopting RTW increases foreign investment in manufacturing in both states, but Michigan's RTW law is associated with gains in service-sector projects even while Indiana's is not. While RTW may attract more manufacturing, it is not enough to generate broad-based gains across the economy.

The Institute of International Finance (IIF) is a key actor in global finance, mixing private-interest representation and market governance roles. Analyzing the historical development of the IIF offers important insights into the interaction between state and business and the resulting patterns of public and private governance. Based on archive sources and a unique set of interviews with elite policymakers spanning three decades, I argue that market structures, interest groups, and public policymaking processes stand in a recursive relationship. Secondly, I argue that interest groups take on private governance roles with the aim to remain the focal point of public policymakers vis-à-vis competing interest groups. This has important implications for the study of interest groups and global financial governance. The analysis of interest groups should be extended to the way they shape markets through private governance mechanisms and how that recursively feeds back into interest group advocacy and public policymaking processes to fully grasp lobbying dynamics. The study of global governance should include analysis of interest group competition within the opportunities and constraints emanating from public policymaking processes so as to understand the emergence of private patterns of governance and their interaction with public governance mechanisms.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) retain a strong presence in many economies around the world. How do governments manage these firms given their dual economic and political nature? Many states use authority over executive appointments as a key means of governing SOEs. We analyze the nature of this “personnel power” by assessing patterns in SOE leaders’ political mobility in China, the country with the largest state-owned sector. Using logit and multinomial models on an original dataset of central SOE leaders’ attributes and company information from 2003 to 2017, we measure the effects of economic performance and political connectedness on leaders’ likelihood of staying in power. We find that leaders of well-performing firms and those with patronage ties to elites in charge of their evaluation are more likely to stay in office. These findings suggest that states can leverage personnel power in pursuit of economic and political stability when SOE management is highly politically integrated.