Abstract
This thesis contains three self-standing essays dealing with legal and economic issues of the World Trade Organization (WTO)
Essay 1 deals with the role of dispute settlement courts in trade agreements. We show that trade courts may assume a variety of roles, including that of information repository, honest broker, arbitrator and calculator of damages, active information gatherer and adjudicator
Essay 2 deals with the optimal trade policy flexibility in the WTO. Modeling the WTO as an incomplete tarif liberalization contract with asymmetrically revealed contingencies, we find that a "liability rule" backed by "expectation remedies" Pareto-dominates any other remedy arrangement
Essay 3 examines the nature of the WTO contract, and focuses particularly on the intricate link between trade policy flexibility mechanisms and the object and purpose of contract enforcement. This paper is an attempt to broker between the two camps in the ongoing "compliance-vs.-rebalancing" debat that permeates WTO scholarship
Essay 1 deals with the role of dispute settlement courts in trade agreements. We show that trade courts may assume a variety of roles, including that of information repository, honest broker, arbitrator and calculator of damages, active information gatherer and adjudicator
Essay 2 deals with the optimal trade policy flexibility in the WTO. Modeling the WTO as an incomplete tarif liberalization contract with asymmetrically revealed contingencies, we find that a "liability rule" backed by "expectation remedies" Pareto-dominates any other remedy arrangement
Essay 3 examines the nature of the WTO contract, and focuses particularly on the intricate link between trade policy flexibility mechanisms and the object and purpose of contract enforcement. This paper is an attempt to broker between the two camps in the ongoing "compliance-vs.-rebalancing" debat that permeates WTO scholarship