Research

Political risk and coordination failure are two leading causes of low investment and growth in low- and middle-income countries. The international community devotes substantial resources to addressing these challenges. We show that these problems are intertwined: political risk induces coordination failure. We then propose a subsidy program to eliminate politically induced miscoordination. Our program—Guaranteed Return with Profit- and Loss-Sharing (GPLS)—offers a minimum return to investors while clawing back returns above a specified maximum. The design screens out investors who would have invested even without subsidies and induces participation from more hesitant investors at minimal cost. Optimally designed GPLS programs significantly reduce costs relative to natural alternatives, such as guaranteed return schemes (e.g., fixed annual payments of $x$ per cent) or Guaranteed Return with Profit-Sharing (GPS) programs. Such optimal subsidies represent a major step toward feasible and sustainable international interventions to coordinate development under political risk.

To what extent does global economic exchange deter conflict between countries? This paper re-examines the pacifying effect of economic ties by examining investment behavior in the presence of geopolitical risks. While investments can deter conflict by raising its opportunity cost, the risk of war also affects firms’ willingness to invest. The central finding is that deterrence depends not on the total volume of investment but on how capital is distributed across firms. When capital is concentrated in a few large investors, an individual commitment can be pivotal in tipping a government toward peace. By contrast, when the same amount of capital is dispersed across many smaller firms, individual contributions have negligible influence on government decision. In both cases, firms must coordinate to deter conflict, but the coordination problem increases greatly when capital is dispersed across many investors, limiting the pacifying effect of investments.

What explains the sudden rise in the adoption of investment screening mechanisms? Existing theories focus on either domestic determinants or structural factors, but they largely overlook the security risks created by inward foreign investments. This project argues that these security factors are central to understanding why states regulate foreign investments. I present a formal model in which a government designs an optimal screening mechanism to manage security risks arising from foreign acquisitions of domestic firms. Foreign investors can be of two types: commercial investors, who seek purely economic returns, and strategic investors, who also benefit from undermining the host country’s national security, for example, by acquiring sensitive technologies or eroding domestic industrial capacity. The government offers a menu of contracts specifying the allowable acquisition share and the intensity of review designed to detect undermining. A key insight is that the optimal mechanism contains a no-screening contract. Because monitoring is costly, the government does not want to screen all investors. Instead, the availability of a contract with no monitoring, alongside stricter reviews for larger stakes, induces strategic investors to reveal themselves by selecting into the no-screening option. This design allows the host country to continue receiving foreign investment, including from strategic investors, while keeping security risks under control.