What factors explain U.S. participation in multilateral forums that govern finance? Current literature misses the key features of the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and Congress that result in their distinct manners of support for various multilateral arrangements. I revisit the archival record and apply a new understanding to American participation in the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) as the financial regime has evolved since the collapse of fixed parity in the IMF after 1971. I thus explain the puzzle of American ambivalence through an exploration of the fragmented U.S. regulatory system, which inhibits the United States from acting as a unitary, lead actor of multilateral negotiations. Hence, American coordination must take place both domestically and internationally for an agreement to emerge.

This paper examines revolutionary changes in the federal procurement regime that have taken place over roughly the past thirty-five years. The procurement process has long been formalized, but contractors were dispersed across the country and tended to furnish tangible goods in singular and discrete transactions. As a result of technology, global competition and security threats, ideological shifts, and fiscal changes, procurement spending exploded after 9/11 and today the regime forms “information communities” in which private companies exert both political and economic influence and supply staffing and information to the federal government within a continuous and seamless relationship where lines demarcating responsibilities and personnel are blurred.

Most theories of government growth place nearly exclusive attention on real changes in public sector activity. Yet, much nominal post–WWII government spending growth was not in the form of the public sector doing more relative to the general economy (real growth), but in the form of government activities becoming relatively more expensive (cost growth). Baumol's (1967) “cost disease” model is our best guide to understanding cost growth, but over time, Baumol has offered conflicting hypotheses about how cost growth bears on real growth. Using 1947–2012 U.S. data, we test these hypotheses, along with a more novel expectation, by modifying Berry and Lowery's (1987b) econometric models of real growth in public purchases and transfers to consider the influence of government cost growth on real public domestic spending.

In the period from the 1990s emerging market financial crises until the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008, the development of domestic bond markets in developing economies was a prominent agenda item in international financial reform circles. The crises of the 1990s drew attention to the vulnerabilities generated by frequently occurring double mismatches of currency denominations and maturities in the borrowing of emerging economies. This led to a series of reform efforts targeted at both increasing liquidity and the range of borrowers in domestic bond markets. In the aggregate, these efforts were successful: For emerging market economies as a whole, domestic debt now exceeds international debt. Moreover, domestic corporate bond markets have emerged in many countries, often for the first time. However, the nature of market development has been far from uniform, and often has not been in line with government aims. In this paper, we examine the interplay of government and business actors in market development. Drawing on 155 interviews with policy and market actors as well as secondary data, we show that the main explanation of variation in market development lies in the pre-existing structure of financial markets, conceptualized as a heterogeneous set of interest/influence constellations.

Although technological learning is indispensable for economic transformation in developing countries, recent research on industrial policy both lacks consensus regarding policy models and engages in little long-term analysis of policy impacts. This study contributes to this literature through a controlled case comparison of the varied addition of new and unique functional capacities in the Mexican and Brazilian automotive and petroleum industries from 1975 to 2000. It offers a dynamic industrial policy perspective that underscores the explanatory role of alternating state- and market-led industrial policy approaches and their associated cumulative processes of “exploration” and “exploitation” (March (1991)). It also suggests that two background conditions—prior investments in learning and exogenous shocks that undermine the status quo—intervene decisively in the successful sequencing of policy approaches. The study concludes by proposing a framework that recognizes three main learning pathways formed through different configurations of the main independent variable and background conditions. This framework can be deployed as a rough predictive tool to assess how other industries might most effectively increase their technological sophistication.