The increased importance of understanding the institutional environment — i.e., political, economic & bureaucratic institutions — has been highlighted by a few developments: first, institutional arrangements appear to explain variation in cross-national economic efficiency; second, the economic implications of domestic institutional arrangements are no longer contained within a nation.  In short, the rapid internationalization of markets has enhanced the merit of factoring any relationship between institutions and international competition.  Accordingly, the political-economic research in this project aims to understand how variations in the cross-national institutional environment impact economic outcomes, and to analyze the two-way relationship between domestic institutional arrangements and international competitive outcomes.  With regard to the second aim, we are particularly interested in both the institutional drivers of exports and foreign-direct-investment, and the impact of international competition on domestic institutional arrangements.  Among the specific issues investigated are:

• the role of standardization on trade and foreign-direct-investment flows
• the impact of domestic cartel arrangements on export performance
• the relationship between trade-orientation and domestic merger policy
• the institutional determinants of mobile telecommunications productivity