Which states join international institutions? Existing theories of the multilateral trade regime, the GATT/WTO, emphasize gains from cooperation on substantive policies regulated by the institution. We argue that political ties rather than issue-area functional gains determine who joins, and we show how geopolitical alignment shapes the demand and supply sides of membership. Discretionary accession rules allow members to selectively recruit some countries in pursuit of foreign policy goals, and common interests attract applicants who are not yet free traders. We use a duration model to statistically analyze accession time to application and length of accession negotiations for the period 1948-2014. Our findings challenge the view that states first liberalize trade to join the GATT/WTO. Instead, democracy and foreign policy similarity encourage states to join. The importance of political ties for membership in the trade regime suggests that theories of international institutions must look beyond narrowly defined institutional scope.

Financial regulatory networks are a pervasive new type of global governance heralded by some as a flexible answer to globalization dilemmas and dismissed by others as ineffective because of weak enforcement mechanisms. Whether regulatory network agreements provide global public goods or private goods for certain states’ firms is a second debated issue. This article adjudicates among competing perspectives by examining whether Basel III, an international agreement about bank capital minimums negotiated by the bank regulatory network in 2009 and 2010, was viewed as credible and affecting regulated US firms. I use stock returns to measure investors’ perceptions, and an event study methodology to test whether regulated banks’ observed stock returns significantly differ from expected stock returns on days when new information about Basel III becomes available. If the agreement is viewed as credible and affecting firm value, banks’ stock returns will deviate from expectations. The direction of any deviation indicates whether regulations benefit or hurt banks. Although the direction of effects is not uniform across events, I find that the initial stock return reaction and the net effect across all five events are negative, and of a similar magnitude as regulated foreign banks, indicating that US banks were harmed, and did not benefit from, the new international regulations. US banks experienced stock returns that differed from expectations, providing evidence that international regulatory network agreements are viewed as credible and tangibly affect firms independent of domestic implementation.

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Financial crises are often presented as triggers for important innovations in international regulation of financial markets, but existing evidence for this claim primarily derive from the analyses of individual initiatives, assessed against noncomparable benchmarks. In order to provide systematic evidence of financial crises' impact on international financial regulatory change, this paper develops a novel text-as-data approach to measure regulatory novelty. We use this approach to analyze the full population of international banking and securities standards between 1975 and 2016. Contrary to theoretical expectations, our empirical findings indicate rules designed by international banking and securities regulators following financial crises are on average as likely to build on existing international regulations as those designed before a crisis. We also find that international banking rules published after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis are an important exception.

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