13:15 - 15:30
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Gorana Grgic
Discussant/s:
David Weyrauch
Meeting Room M

Alexander Slaski, Faisal Ahmed
Can diplomacy affect international trade?: Evidence from US ambassadorial vacancies

Paulina Napierala
Christians United for Israel (CUFI): the influence of a religious interest group on US foreign policy and international relations.

Gorana Grgic
Transplanting the transatlantic: United States and Europe in the Indo-Pacific

Isabell Burmester
EU and Russian regulatory power: Prescribing norms and rules in food safety and transport regimes

Lukas Rudolph, Markus Freitag, Paul Thurner
The comparative legitimacy of arms exports -- A survey experiment in Germany and France
Can diplomacy affect international trade?: Evidence from US ambassadorial vacancies
Alexander Slaski 1, Faisal Ahmed 2
1 Leiden University
2 Princeton University

As official representatives of governments, ambassadors are charged with prevent-ing conflict and fostering cooperation. They are also empowered to promote the se-curity and economic interests of their home states, including by increasing exportsand facilitating cooperative trade outcomes. As such, during ambassadorial vacan-cies, diplomatic influence – and the associated commercial cooperation – is likely towane. We evaluate this theory by tracing the impact of US ambassadorial vacancieson bilateral international trade. Leveraging high-frequency and plausibly exogenousvariation in vacancies associated with the timing of US Presidential inaugurations, weshow that periods of US ambassadorial vacancies reduce US exports, but do not affectUS imports. These findings are driven by the vacancies of career diplomats, and aremagnified in poorer countries, where the lower quality of institutions and regulationsmake the information exchange and commitment mechanisms that diplomats provideeven more vital. One first contribution to the existing research comes from using fine-grained monthly-level and product-level data (whereas previous research has used onlyaggregated annual flows). Our second contribution is that we test the specific causalmechanisms through which diplomats influence trade flows. Our findings demonstratethe conditions under which and channels through which diplomacy can affect bilat-eral trade flows, adding to the burgeoning literature on the role of ambassadors inpromoting commercial cooperation.