Three essays on international-cooperation problems and institutional-design solutions

This dissertation investigates how international institutions have coped with economic globalization having been under increased strain over the past three decades. Economic crises, global pandemics, and the increased domestic politicization of international trade and investment have rendered economic agreements increasingly difficult to conclude and tricky to design. This work asks how designers of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have adapted these institutions in response to similar challenges. It argues that the design solutions adopted have hardly undermined the coordinating function of PTAs and BITs and have even made these institutions more stringent and effective in some instances. The first essay finds that PTAs negotiated at times of heightened uncertainty tend to be deeper than average, acting as credible commitment devices for contracting governments. The second essay finds that states are not simply willing to retrench their BIT commitments to protect foreign investors in the aftermath of investor-state arbitral claims (ISDS). Rather, governments do so punctually, based on the nature of the incurred ISDS claim, to preserve the role of arbitration and BITs as efficient credible-commitment mechanisms. The third paper argues and empirically finds that governments facing incomplete-contracting problems in their PTA liberalization commitments, due to domestic political salience, advance such commitments ex-post, following ratification, to bypass domestic opposition.