The Constraining Power of International Treaties: Theory and Methods

By Beth A. Simmons, Daniel Hopkins. American Political Science Review, 2005

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We acknowledge the contribution of von Stein (2005) in calling attention to the very real problem of selection bias in estimating treaty effects. Nonetheless, we dispute both von Stein's theoretical and empirical conclusions. Theoretically, we contend that treaties can both screen and constrain simultaneously, meaning that findings of screening do nothing to undermine the claim that treaties constrain state behavior as well. Empirically, we question von Stein's estimator on several grounds, including its strong distributional assumptions and its statistical inconsistency. We then illustrate that selection bias does not account for much of the difference between Simmons's (2000) and von Stein's (2005) estimated treaty effects, and instead reframe the problem as one of model dependency. Using a preprocessing matching step to reduce that dependency, we then illustrate treaty effects that are both substantively and statistically significant—and that are quite close in magnitude to those reported by Simmons.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/97d97ce742b55922c639b210bd04e2c31f8fae6c

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Citations in the corpus

Problem Structure, Institutional Design, and the Relative Effectiveness of International Environmental Agreements (2006, background): “On issues of endogeneity, see, Keohane and Martin 2003; von Stein 2005; and Simmons and Hopkins 2005. variables identiªed as the sources of institutional design (i.e., regime design variables) are also identiªed as the sources of the behaviors those institutions target (i.e., regime effectiveness…”
The International Monetary Fund: A review of the recent evidence (2008, background): “In response, Simmons and Hopkins (2005) argue that von Stein’s findings can be attributed in large part to model specification choices, rather than to selection effects, and go on to show that Simmons’ original finding is supported by an alternative model that imposes less demanding assumptions on”
When Does Institutional Investor Activism Increase Shareholder Value?: The Carbon Disclosure Project (2011, background): “…the literature on international institutions, which discusses how such institutions can affect domestic policy through various channels even in the absence of legal obligations (Keohane, et al., 1993; Cortell and Davis, 1996; Bernstein, 2002; Martin and Simmons, 2005; Simmons and Hopkins, 2005).”
Treaty Compliance and Violation (2010, background): “Methods exist to address endogeneity and selection, but they involve trade-offs and are highly imperfect (Simmons & Hopkins 2005; von Stein 2005).”