A growing literature links firms' foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade to deeper global value chains and political outcomes, but most work focuses on FDI home countries and overlooks firm–product level interactions where those interdependencies actually arise. This study asks how firms' FDI reshapes host countries' trade profiles at the firm–product level and how those changes help form political coalitions for trade liberalization.
Existing research holds that socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals avoid information that highlights risk. An alternative expectation is proposed: when risks from global economic shocks become salient, some disadvantaged people—especially internal migrants—may be more motivated to learn about the distributional effects of those shocks.
Founding leader personality cults are central to how some states tell stories about themselves and sustain popular loyalty. Paul Schuler, Trung-Anh Nguyen, Yongfeng Tang, and Mohammad Khan examine how these highly visible national narratives originate, asking whether cults always follow from a leader’s personal grab for power or can be intentionally created earlier for collective legitimation.
Many international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) run advocacy campaigns in the Global South to reduce demand for threatened species, but these campaigns sometimes provoke local resistance. Takumi Shibaike investigates when and why conservation messaging succeeds or backfires, focusing on pangolin conservation in Vietnam. The study speaks to how local cultural and economic interests shape public responses to foreign advocacy efforts.
Authoritarian leaders rely on lower-level bureaucrats for information about society, but local officials can distort or filter that information before it reaches the center. Minh Trinh and Warren Wenzhi Lu ask when and why centralization reforms—designed to bypass local gatekeepers and improve information flow—succeed in reducing this distortion and when they fail.
A firm-level field experiment tested whether Vietnamese companies would comply better with government regulations if given the chance to provide feedback. Firms received no advance information but were offered opportunities during regulatory processes.
Decentralization is often thought to improve public services. However, recent work challenges this view as many governments reverse decentralization policies.
Context: Donor projects assumed legislative transparency reforms could work like democracies, where voters pressure officials. But our new field experiment shows otherwise.