Jason Webb Yackee

Do Bits Really Work? Revisiting the Empirical Link between Investment Treaties and Foreign Direct Investment

In this article I replicate, expand, and critique an earlier analysis by Neumayer and Spess claiming to have identified strong evidence that developing countries that sign bilateral investment treaties (BITs) enjoy massive increases in foreign direct investment (FDI). In the face of a series of relatively small but very justifiable changes in methodology and model specification the apparently positive effect of BITs on FDI largely (and in some cases entirely) falls from statistical significance. I conclude that the case for BITs is far weaker than Neumayer and Spess suggest.

The First Investor-State Arbitration: The Suez Canal Company v Egypt (1864)

This article provides an in-depth examination of the earliest investor-state arbitration appearing in the historical record—the 1864 arbitration between the Suez Canal Company and Egypt. The arbitration is fascinating because the Company’s claim of mistreatment has a strikingly modern character: under what circumstances, and with what consequences, can the government of the day change its laws in order to promote its conception of the public good, where the change negatively impacts the value of the foreigner’s investments? Egypt demanded the right to eliminate the forced labor regime upon which the canal project’s finances depended; the Company demanded compensation. The arbitral commission’s solution, based essentially on a principle of sanctity of contract, is one that finds significant support in modern jurisprudence. Citing ‘the contract’ is, and long has been, a powerful rhetorical and legal weapon for the aggrieved investor.

Is the Bush Bureaucracy Any Different? A Macro-Empirical Examination of Notice and Comment Rulemaking under “43”

Much has been made in the popular press of President George W. Bush’s status as the “first MBA President” (see Pfiffner 2007; Breul 2007; and see Lewis chapter two). The implication is that Bush’s two years at Harvard Business School well equipped him to transform, or to transformatively lead, an inefficient, unwieldy, and unacceptably independent federal bureaucracy. Bush himself, at a campaign stop in 2000, ridiculed then vice president Gore’s efforts to “reinvent government” as mere “reshuffling”: Today, when Americans look to Washington, they see a government that is slow to respond, to reform, ignoring changes that are taking place in the private sector and in some local and state governments. (Mitchell 2000)