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 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.

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.

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 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 specifies and explores the hypothesis that the diversity of human languages, right now a barrier to “interoperability” in communication and trade, will become significantly less of a barrier as machine translation technologies are deployed over the next several years. We argue that machine translation will become the 2020's analogy for ideas, to what container shipping did for goods trade in the second half of the twentieth century. But as with container shipping or railroads in the nineteenth century, this new boundary-cost and transaction-cost reducing technology does not reduce all boundary and transaction costs equally, and so creates new challenges for the distribution of ideas and thus for innovation and economic growth. How we develop, license, commercialize, and deploy machine translation will be a critical determinant of its impact on trade, political coalitions, diversity of thought and culture, and the distribution of wealth.