Germany is pivotal to the success of any trade agreement between the European Union and the United States. As the third largest exporter in the world, Germany is dependent on open markets; throughout the post-war period, government support for free trade has been unequivocal. Despite these positive incentives for expanding free trade, both German business and the wider public voiced fierce opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). TTIP became a flash point for the German public to overcome collective action problems and create a broad protest movement against a free trade agreement for the first time in German history. This movement enabled the public to successfully exercise influence on German foreign economic policy-making, which had long been protected from public pressure. By 2015, the success of that pressure in penetrating the policy-making apparatus combined with growing government concern about the potential of international firms to undermine national policy. As a result of the confluence of these two forces, German leaders changed their position in TTIP negotiations.

Since 2008, a massive shift has occurred from active toward passive investment strategies. The passive index fund industry is dominated by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, which we call the “Big Three.” We comprehensively map the ownership of the Big Three in the United States and find that together they constitute the largest shareholder in 88 percent of the S&P 500 firms. In contrast to active funds, the Big Three hold relatively illiquid and permanent ownership positions. This has led to opposing views on incentives and possibilities to actively exert shareholder power. Some argue passive investors have little shareholder power because they cannot “exit,” while others point out this gives them stronger incentives to actively influence corporations. Through an analysis of proxy vote records we find that the Big Three do utilize coordinated voting strategies and hence follow a centralized corporate governance strategy. However, they generally vote with management, except at director (re-)elections. Moreover, the Big Three may exert “hidden power” through two channels: First, via private engagements with management of invested companies; and second, because company executives could be prone to internalizing the objectives of the Big Three. We discuss how this development entails new forms of financial risk.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has the potential to be a landmark treaty on many grounds. According to European and American officials, one of the main features that should differentiate the TTIP from other bilateral free trade agreements is, beyond its unprecedented scale, the ambition of its regulatory dimension. On both sides of the Atlantic there is a strong incentive to mitigate the impacts of “behind-the-border” obstacles that mostly stem from existing divergences between laws and regulations applied in Europe and in the United States. To do this, trade negotiators, together with policymakers and regulators, attempt, when possible and desirable, to facilitate the convergence of the policies that frame the European and the American markets. This paper analyzes how convergence may be reached with regards to the regulation of the digital economy, a relatively new area of interest in the field of trade law and policy studies, that seems to deserve a specific attention considering the growing importance it has taken at the domestic level and in the context of trade negotiations.

The financial system is governed not just by formal rules but also by social relationships that pervade the elite strata of society. Understanding such dynamics entails understanding complex relational ties between actors, a task that can be facilitated through the use of network analysis. We argue that a latent feature of interest to scholars of the political economy of finance is one of social distance, which is a measurable concept. Using new data from the financial sector, we measure the social distance between a range of financial firms and one key regulator, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), over time to assess whether or not social distance is related to organizations’ advocacy behavior. We find a positive relationship between how close a given organization is to the SEC and how often it engages in advocacy. The result persists when we control for numerous factors related to organizational characteristics, firm size, and when we measure advocacy frequency in different ways.

This article examines the controversial investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in recent mega-free trade agreement. Below, I examine the origins of the ISDS concept and outline the controversy surrounding its use in the context of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Then, I provide a theoretical discussion that outlines both the exogenous and endogenous factors that contribute to the inclusion of ISDS provisions in international trade agreements. Focusing on the latter endogenous factors, I then argue that not all international trade agreements are the same and that, as such, it is possible to develop a typology of international trade agreement across two variables (the number of parties and relative power) that impact the appropriateness of including an ISDS provision. I test this typology against the empirical record. Finally, I discuss potential innovations to the ISDS provisions and market-based mechanisms that address the dual challenges of discrimination and expropriation that ISDS is designed to address.1

We contribute to the post-crisis literature on macroeconomic stability by arguing that polycentric banking systems can better achieve stability than monocentric systems. Building on the theories of E. Ostrom, we engage the literature on free banking systems to show that these systems met the requirements of polycentric governance systems, and that the unintentional result of the underlying governance institutions was macroeconomic stability. In contrast, modern central banking, because it is monocentric, lacks important features regarding knowledge aggregation and incentive compatibility conducive to generating macroeconomic stability. We conclude by discussing various legal barriers that stand in the way of a transition from monetary monocentrism to monetary polycentrism.