Recent developments in the international banking system, especially the 2007–9 crisis and subsequent wave of postcrisis regulation, have drawn increasing attention to the structural power of banks and banking systems. States need a functioning financial system to ensure the overall health of their economies, so states must shape policy to protect their financial firms. National financial systems may be dominated either by banks or by capital markets. In states where banks dominate provision of capital, states must shape policy to protect their banks because of their structural importance, independent of any lobbying or other direct action on the part of banks to exercise instrumental power. The entangling of structural and instrumental power means studying differences in structural power requires either careful case-study work or cross-national comparison of responses to a common shock. The implementation of the 2011 Basel III Accords provides just such an opportunity. This article offers a quantitative analysis of a new dataset of implementation of Basel III components in the Basel Committee on Banking Stability member states from 2011 to 2019 and demonstrates the structural power of banks in bank-based systems to accelerate implementation of favorable policies and slow implementation of unfavorable ones.

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.

Recent decades have witnessed increased public concern about vehicle emissions and growing frustration with political inaction and business preferences for the status quo. This article provides historical perspective on such regulatory dynamics by analyzing the Swiss and the Swedish cases of vehicle emission governance in the1970s-1980s. Relying on archival documents detailing the policy process in both countries as well as on international regulatory arenas, the analysis focuses on political solutions for reducing the toxicity of vehicle emissions. It uncovers the influence of national as well as international business groups and the existence of the tension between various national ministries, arising from conflicting environmental and trade-related goals. Is also highlights the importance of different institutional settings in creating the expertise to explain the political outcomes. While the Swiss corporatist system gave a great deal of power to a variety of interest groups at each stage of the political process, the Swedish government invested significant resources in the creation of independent expertise and enjoyed a relative autonomy, despite the importance of the Swedish car industry. The analysis also assesses the importance of the Swiss–Swedish collaboration in overcoming certain obstacles and their contribution to the implementation of stricter regulations in Europe that ultimately occurred at the margins of the European Economic Community.

The Philippines was among the fastest-growing economies averaging within the 6.5 percent GDP growth in the past five years. However, the COVID-19 crisis brought major disruptions to the Philippine economy as growth, employment, and overall productivity fell into recession levels along with the declaration of a nationwide lockdown. As the pandemic resulted in a series of business closures, supply chain breakdowns, and massive job cuts, the private sector was forced to confront the challenges brought by the pandemic including its threat to business continuity and survival. This article presents the private sector's assessment of the pandemic's impact on the Philippine economy along with their views on the national pandemic response and the extent of public-private collaborations in countering the effects of COVID-19. Following the insights and experiences shared by industry leaders and other corporate executives, this article also discusses pivots in corporate strategy along with a significant shift in corporate mindset toward new ways of doing business and fulfilling their responsibilities in society.

The idea of bringing democratization at the workplace has been present in management literature for decades. Literature has witnessed an increased interest of researchers on this topic, especially after the 2003 Academy of Management Annual Meeting conference having the theme “Democracy in a Knowledge Economy,” and August 2004 special issue of the Academy of Management Executive: “Democracy in and around Organizations.” To further explore this underpinned concept, the present study aims to refine and develop the organizational democracy construct. Using in-depth literature analysis published in last three decades on organizational democracy, ten dimensions (freedom, fairness, integrity, tolerance, shared responsibility, structure, transparency, knowledge sharing, accountability, and learning environment) were identified, leading to the development of its conceptual framework. By deploying established scale development procedures, the organizational democracy scale was developed, refined, and validated. The new organizational democracy scale consists of forty-five items consistent with theory and practice. The scale will assist future researchers and industrial practitioners in a deeper exploration of this construct and organizational managers for establishing, assessing, and improving democratic practices at their workplaces.

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.

This article develops a conceptual framework for explaining variation in the United States’ economic statecraft in the Cold War and the present day, focusing on how US officials perceived the type of geoeconomic capability that its rivals possessed and the type of national security challenge that they posed. This framework specifies four ideal-type strategies on the part of the United States: economic containment, national economic competition, technological containment, and national technological competition. Analyses of U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union, China, and Japan support the theory. These ideal types explain why, in the rivalry with Japan in the 1980s, the United States openly engaged in competition but did not adopt containment, relying on Voluntary Export Restraints, currency devaluation agreements, and bilateral semiconductor agreements rather than placing Japan on something historically analogous to the Commerce Department's contemporary Entity List or targeting Japan with comprehensive export controls through an institution like CoCom. These ideal types (and the theory behind them) also explain why the United States has implemented containment measures against specific Chinese companies but has not pursued a systematic “decoupling” of the US and Chinese economies.

Why do states participate in bilateral investment treaties (BITs)? In this article, I examine the role of indirect investment on BIT formation. Indirect investment flows are an important aspect of the global investment regime that are underexamined by research focused on direct flows only. Indirect flows play an important role in affecting incentives for BIT participation because firms channel investment through intermediary destinations to take advantage of existing BITs. I argue that governments are more likely to participate in BITs when states expect to access groups of capital exporting states through second order links. When selecting BIT partners, states evaluate expected indirect foreign direct investment (FDI) flows by considering characteristics of a potential partner's second order FDI partners. States are thus more likely to participate in BITs when expectations for indirect flows are high. I use a variety of analyses to demonstrate evidence in favor of my hypotheses. I find evidence that indirect flows affect the likelihood of BIT formation and increase dyadic FDI flows. This research provides a novel explanation for BIT formation and contributes to research on indirect capital flows, treaty shopping and BIT formation.

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.

China's maritime militia groups have attracted much scholarly attention in recent years. Systematically funded and trained by the Chinese authorities, the militia groups help advance China's maritime claims but risk both intended and unintended physical clashes at sea. Based on the 2001 Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, this study explores the possibility of establishing and recognizing China's state responsibility in relation to the internationally wrongful conduct of its maritime militia. China's maritime militia groups blur the line between fishing boats and naval forces. In essence, they are empowered to perform the critical function of the Chinese government as provided by Chinese internal laws. As shown by emerging evidence, China's maritime militia groups are also instructed, directed, and/or controlled by the Chinese state organs including military authority and party leadership, both central and local. This study finds that the conduct of Chinese maritime militia constitutes the breach of China's international obligations in terms of (1) due regard for other states, (2) maritime safety, (3) marine environment protection and preservation, and/or (4) the overfishing ban.

Which factors make some American multinational corporations (MNCs) take political action in response to the US–China Trade War and cause others to stay on the sidelines? We identify China-based subsidiaries of US firms to identify firms’ political actions in response to the trade war. We combine data on firms’ tariff exposure, economic actions in China, and political actions in the United States during the trade war. Together these data highlight the divergent strategies with which firms engage. Even though more than 63 percent of MNCs in our sample were adversely impacted by tariffs, only 22 percent voice opposition and 7 percent exit in response to the trade war. Our analysis reveals that US MNCs in China differ in their business models, ownership structure, experience in China, and size of capital investments. These firm-level factors determine the degree to which US MNCs are embedded in China. This in turn shapes how firms perceive political risk and choose from the menu of options to deal with the trade war. Size and age increase voice while joint-venture status decreases it.

Firms with well-formulated competitive market strategies could still fail due to their lack of effective nonmarket strategy. Climate change poses significant threats to firms and presents firms’ need to develop nonmarket strategy integrated with market strategy. Relying on the unique dataset of US S&P 500 firms’ responses to climate change, this study seeks to ask why some firms attempt to engage in climate policy making, while others do not do so. The results found that firms with organizational resources and capabilities underlying their carbon market strategy are more likely to support mandatory climate policy. It sheds light on the significance of integrated market and nonmarket strategies, particularly when business opportunities are controlled more by governments than by markets.

This article examines the economic influence activities (EIAs) of firms. We argue that firms invest in jobs and establishments in districts of congressional committee members that have oversight over their businesses and industries. This investment increases as legislators’ power rises in Congress. Our theory makes three predictions. First, EIAs by firms will be higher in congressional districts where the legislators have substantial political influence over the firm, relative to districts where legislators have little influence over the firm. Second, EIAs will increase with the legislators’ power on the focal committee. Third, when a legislator exits the committee, EIAs will diminish, but previous investments in the district will remain. We test these predictions by analyzing the Trinet census of establishments, mapped into the committee structure of the US Congress, by tracking the investment and employment of firms in each industry in each congressional district over time. Using fixed-effects models, we show the predictions of the theory find substantial support in the US Senate but not the House. We explore causality by using exogenous exits of politicians by death and scandals to further complement our analysis, and discuss why EIAs may be less likely to occur and detect in the House.

Firms that offshore final production should oppose trade barriers “protecting” their own industry. This pits them against onshore firms, especially when comparative disadvantage is most pronounced, and so fundamentally alters trade policy coalitions. The US-China trade war's exclusion process, where US firms could request that tariffs not be applied to a product, provides a golden opportunity to test this contention. We show that coverage by a tariff in the trade war and firm characteristics associated with offshoring—size, multinationality, and heavy imports from China—interacted to generate firm requests for exclusion from the trade war's tariffs. This finding is robust to input-sourcing and fears of export retaliation as alternative explanations, and across multiple measures of firm size, tariff coverage, and exclusion requests. We therefore test a key piece of the firm-centered model of trade politics and show its value in interpreting the US-China trade war.

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.

This article develops a micro-level theoretical perspective of business influence in international negotiations. By drawing on organizational institutional theory, the article proposes that site-specific institutionalized norms can structure the nature and extent of business power. The article illustrates the value of this perspective through an illustrative case study of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) through interviews and participant observation of on-site dynamics during negotiations on environmental shipping regulation. The article shows how, in the case of the IMO, specific institutionalized norms and beliefs structure private actors’ possible influence and their claims to authority. In particular, strongly held beliefs about the nature of political deliberation in the IMO both constrain and enable business interests, sometimes overriding the general structural power of the shipping industry. This research implies that future scholarship of business power and lobbying should be attentive to specific institutionalized ideas structuring business actors’ range of legitimate activities, in particular in international institutions where individual negotiation sites can develop idiosyncratic norms and beliefs about the legitimacy of private actor participation.

This article constructs a measure of geopolitical and economic tensions in US–China relations based on the sentiment expressed in major US news media and utilizes it to analyze the impact of bilateral tensions on US imports from China between 2002 and 2019. Our results suggest that bilateral tensions have had a negative effect on US imports. Additional analyses of the impact of bilateral tensions for industries with varying levels of supply chain linkages to China suggest that, contrary to expectations, they have more disproportionately affected industries highly integrated with the Chinese market. This pattern continues to hold during the trade war period. Not only were bilateral tensions associated with higher tariffs for industries with high levels of global value chain linkages to China, but the tariff hikes have also had a more sustained impact on such industries. Overall, our findings indicate that potential “sunk costs” considerations may not have been strong enough to forestall the downward trend in bilateral trade relations under both routine diplomacy and trade war conditions.

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.