Abstract: Do targeted sanctions hurt American firms financially? Existing research offers competing arguments but little firm-level evidence on financial fundamentals. We shift the debate from aggregate sender costs to response-conditional performance. Our real options theory shows that partial, evolving sanctions present firms with binary choices depending on their starting position. Prior suppliers stay or exit; […]

Abstract: Issues like trade are often considered too technical and low salience to appear in national debates, raising questions over the increasing supply of trade messages in campaign speeches. We develop a theoretical framework that explains where and when elites supply trade messages. Incumbent-party candidates avoid trade messages, even where doing so would win local support, […]