Endogenous Fragility: Noncompliance and Enforcement in International Organizations [manuscript]

Why do international organizations (IOs) deliberately choose ambitious goals that make cooperation fragile and enforcement noncredible? I show that this empirical puzzle can be answered without assuming asymmetric information. I develop a formal model of a dynamic interaction between an IO and a prospective member. The IO faces a trade-off between increasing the value of cooperation by setting ambitious goals and ensuring member compliance by scaling back. Importantly, while higher demands have a natural \textit{direct} effect on the member's incentive to comply, they may also have a strategic \textit{indirect} effect that undermines the IO's enforcement credibility. I find that the IO may optimally choose this less reliable form of cooperation with overly ambitious goals followed by risk of noncompliance and crisis management over more stable cooperation with less ambitious goals.

Joining to Survive: A Dynamic Empirical Model of WTO Membership [manuscript]

Over the past 70 years, GATT/WTO membership has expanded significantly, with much research focusing on the factors driving this growth. However, the survival incentives of regimes have been relatively understudied. These incentives are crucial as they likely impact the WTO application process through dynamic and strategic mechanisms. I develop and estimate a model of organizational enlargement, where regimes decide when to apply, and the WTO determines the timing of accession. The findings reveal that the WTO favors democratic regimes and undermines the survival of non-democratic ones through its accession strategy. Non-democracies, anticipating this, are less likely to apply than democracies. A counterfactual analysis shows that without the WTO's preference for democracies, its expansion would slow significantly as the organization becomes disincentivized to accept new members. Consequently, regimes would face higher costs associated with prolonged application processes, further discouraging them from applying.

Multinational Lobbyists: A Structural Approach to Lobbying and Foreign Direct Investment (with Randall W. Stone) [manuscript]

We estimate a dynamic structural model of firm-level lobbying and foreign direct investment decisions to recover the strategic complementarities of the two processes. As expected, we find that both investment and lobbying become more profitable as bilateral relations with the United States improve and that lobbying the US government becomes more profitable as the firm's investment exposure to a foreign country increases. We allow FDI to affect the evolution of bilateral relations, and we find that firms appear to expect a positive effect.

Bargaining with Forgiveness

I aim to analyze an international organization's optimal contract design with a potential member country, given that it can punish the country's noncompliance. In the theoretical framework, after the IO chooses a demand and reward structure, the country decides whether or not to comply with the demand every period. Whenever the IO observes noncompliance, it can punish such misbehavior or forgive the country. I show that the IO's credibility to punish the country for noncompliance depends not on the uncertainty of the country's type, but rather on the IO's choice of contract. Additionally, knowing the country's type before the punishment decision could induce the IO to forgive a "good" country's one-time misbehavior. The IO can overcome this credibility problem by committing to remain uncertain about the country's type - it may, therefore, voluntarily choose not to learn additional information about the bureaucrat.

Economic sanctions, repression capacity, and human rights (with Sinjae Kang and Taehee Whang) Journal of Human Rights 22, no. 2 (2023): 174-197.  [link]

When Does Audience Matter? Challengers’ Stability and Audience Costs (with Chamseul Yu and Taehee Whang) Foreign Policy Analysis 18, no. 3 (2022): orac011.  [link]

Can Middle Powers Coerce?: Behavioral Patterns in Intervention and Sanctions after Cold War (with Taehee Whang) Korean Political Science Review 56, no. 3 (2022): 69-95. [link]