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How do the distributional consequences of economic sanctions impact future trade policy? Regardless of whether sanctions are effective in achieving concessions, sanctions restrict international trade flows, creating rents for import-competing producers, who are protected from international competition. These rents can then be used to pressure the government to implement protectionist policies. Thus, while the lifting of sanctions directly facilitates some international transactions, sanctions also have an indirect effect. They create powerful domestic interest groups in the sanctioned country who seek market protection. I use multiple estimators to evaluate the effect of trade sanctions on tariff rates. The evidence is consistent with the argument that sanctions increase market protection in both the short and long run.

Asset mobility is thought to constrain taxation, as firms with mobile assets can avoid taxation by locating their assets in low-tax jurisdictions. Firms with immobile assets then face higher taxes. By considering the political incentives that accompany widespread financialization, we identify a new limit to the targeting of immobile firms: Publicly traded firms with immobile underlying assets lose more value in financial markets when taxes are increased, as shareholders anticipate that these underlying assets cannot be withheld from taxation. When governments care about this loss in value, their incentive to tax immobile, publicly traded firms declines. Political concern for financial performance therefore limits the extent to which immobile assets can be targeted for taxation. We argue that broad-based participation in the stock market and democratic political institutions increase political concern for financial performance. We discuss the implications of the theory and findings for policy autonomy, firm ownership, and economic voting.

Why are some countries more open to trade than others? Prominent explanations emphasize differences in the influence of voters as consumers. Consumers benefit from lower prices. Because governments in democracies are more responsive to voters, they should implement lower tariffs. We develop and evaluate an implication of this line of argument. If lower tariffs are a response to consumer interests, lower tariffs should be concentrated on products most relevant to consumers. Using data on consumption shares across product categories, we report evidence that consumer interests do not account for lower tariffs. Governments place higher tariffs on goods with higher consumption shares, and we find no evidence that this relationship attenuates under more democratic institutions. There may be a variety of reasons why more democratic states are engaged in higher levels of international trade. A larger concern for consumer interests, however, is likely not among them.

How do firms protect themselves against infringements of their property rights by their own government? The authors develop a theory based on international law and joint asset ownership with foreign firms. Investment agreements protect the assets of foreign firms but are not available to domestic firms. This segmentation of the property rights environment creates a rationale for international financial relationships between firms. By forming financial relationships with foreign firms, domestic firms gain indirect coverage from the property rights available to foreign firms under investment agreements. If a government is less likely to violate the property rights of covered foreign firms, it is also less likely to violate property rights for assets held jointly by domestic and foreign firms. This article presents systematic evidence from data on the activities of firms in countries that have investment agreements with the United States. International financial relationships between firms, through mergers and acquisitions as well as through bond and equity issues, are more common where property rights are weak. The theory suggests a political logic to the fragmentation of firm-ownership stakes across jurisdictions, offers an institutional explanation of international financial flows, and identifies new distributional consequences of international law.

We examine the global ownership structure of firms in the context of the investment regime. Investment agreements extend valuable privileges to firms invested abroad. But, these privileges only apply to firms whose assets are owned in a country that has signed an agreement with their host market; firms lack protections under investment agreements for many of their target markets. We argue that, by strategically locating subsidiaries in ‘transit’ countries, firms systematically expand their access to investment agreements. This firm-specific access to investment agreements through transit countries also has implications for investment flows: Transit countries receive more inflows and outflows of investment. Moreover, the impact of agreements declines over time and treaty partners, as seemingly newly protected firms have previously gained coverage through subsidiaries. Drawing on subsidiary location choices of the world’s largest firms, as well as data on firm ownership structures and aggregate investment flows, we present systematic evidence consistent with this argument. The paper highlights the importance of the global ownership structure of firms in an environment of heterogeneous international rules and discusses new distributional consequences of the investment regime.

When do governments impose costs on foreign firms? Many studies of foreign direct investment focus on incentives for government expropriation, but scholars are often forced to rely on indirect measures of expropriation to conduct empirical analyses. This article introduces a data set which includes information on over 5,000 political risk insurance contracts issued by the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation since 1961, and on all the claims filed by investors under these contracts. These detailed insurance data allow us to study the determinants of foreign investors’ losses from a variety of sources, including expropriation, inconvertibility, and violent conflict. To illustrate the benefits of these data for hypothesis testing, we adopt a comprehensive empirical approach and explore both shared and distinct causes across risk categories.

Political connections provide substantial benefits to firms. We emphasize the ownership of firms as an important channel through which political connections operate, and identify a resulting link between turnover in the political leadership and turnover in the ownership of firms: Political turnover prompts newly politically connected individuals to take, and disconnected individuals to cede, ownership of firms. This pattern should be more pronounced among firms with more immobile assets, because these are more vulnerable to government policy and have more to gain from political connections. Moreover, firms that experience changes to ownership, caused by political turnover, should pay less taxes. Analyses of firm-level data on the owners of companies in 68 middle-income countries are consistent with the theory.

Background Falls are common among older people, and General Practitioners (GPs) could play an important role in implementing strategies to manage fall risk. Despite this, fall prevention is not a routine activity in general practice settings. The iSOLVE cluster randomised controlled trial aimed to evaluate implementation of a fall prevention decision tool in general practice. This paper sought to describe the strategies used and reflect on the enablers and barriers relevant to successful recruitment of general practices, GPs and their patients. Methods Recruitment was conducted within the geographical area of a Primary Health Network in Northern Sydney, Australia. General practices and GPs were engaged via online surveys, mailed invitations to participate, educational workshops, practitioner networks and promotional practice visits. Patients 65 years or older were recruited via mailed invitations, incorporating the practice letterhead and the name(s) of participating GP(s). Observations of recruitment strategies, results and enabling factors were recorded in field notes as descriptive and narrative data, and analysed using mixed-methods. Results It took 19 months to complete recruitment of 27 general practices, 75 GPs and 560 patients. The multiple strategies used to engage general practices and GPs were collectively useful in reaching the targeted sample size. Practice visits were valuable in engaging GPs and staff, establishing interest in fall prevention and commitment to the trial. A mix of small, medium and large practices were recruited. While some were recruited as a whole-practice, other practices had few or half of the number of GPs recruited. The importance of preventing falls in older patients, simplicity of research design, provision of resources and logistic facilitation of patient recruitment appealed to GPs. Recruitment of older patients was successfully achieved by mailed invitations which was a strategy that was familiar to practice staff and patients. Patient response rates were above the expected 10% for most practices. Many practices ( n  = 17) achieved the targeted number of 20 or more patients. Conclusions Recruitment in general practice settings can be successfully achieved through multiple recruitment strategies, effective communication and rapport building, ensuring research topic and design suit general practice needs, and using familiar communication strategies to engage patients. Trial registration The trial was prospectively registered on 29 April 2015 with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trial Registry www.anzctr.org.au (trial ID: ACTRN12615000401550).

People with HIV-1 (PWH) on antiretroviral therapy (ART) can maintain undetectable virus levels, but a small pool of infected cells persists. This pool is largely comprised of defective proviruses that may produce HIV-1 proteins but are incapable of making infectious virus, with only a fraction (~10%) of these cells harboring intact viral genomes, some of which produce infectious virus following ex vivo stimulation (i.e. inducible intact proviruses). A majority of the inducible proviruses that persist on ART are formed near the time of therapy initiation. Here we compared proviral DNA (assessed here as 3’ half genomes amplified from total cellular DNA) and inducible replication competent viruses in the pool of infected cells that persists during ART to determine if the original infection of these cells occurred at comparable times prior to therapy initiation. Overall, the average percent of proviruses that formed late (i.e. around the time of ART initiation, 60%) did not differ from the average percent of replication competent inducible viruses that formed late (69%), and this was also true for proviral DNA that was hypermutated (57%). Further, there was no evidence that entry into the long-lived infected cell pool was impeded by the ability to use the CXCR4 coreceptor, nor was the formation of long-lived infected cells enhanced during primary infection, when viral loads are exceptionally high. We observed that infection of cells that transitioned to be long-lived was enhanced among people with a lower nadir CD4 + T cell count. Together these data suggest that the timing of infection of cells that become long-lived is impacted more by biological processes associated with immunodeficiency before ART than the replication competency and/or cellular tropism of the infecting virus or the intactness of the provirus. Further research is needed to determine the mechanistic link between immunodeficiency and the timing of infected cells transitioning to the long-lived pool, particularly whether this is due to differences in infected cell clearance, turnover rates and/or homeostatic proliferation before and after ART.