This paper investigates the factors that influence the inclusion of social and environmental provisions in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), paying particular attention to their level of enforceability. Although prior research has largely addressed the effectiveness of these provisions and their implications for trade, the underlying drivers of their adoption remain insufficiently explored. To fill this gap, I construct an original dataset that captures the degree of enforcement of sustainable development provisions, using a lexical analysis approach that avoids normative assumptions and enables consistent cross-agreement comparisons. The empirical analysis relies on a probit model applied to a panel of country pairs over time. The results suggest that greater political and social distance between partners is associated with a lower probability of including high-enforcement provisions. By contrast, differences in economic development and trade integration appear to have no systematic effect. These findings underscore the role of political and normative alignment in shaping the design of sustainability-related trade commitments. The paper thus offers a new perspective on how relational asymmetries condition the negotiation and content of trade agreements.

In September 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency revealed that Volkswagen had installed defeat devices to cheat emissions tests, triggering what became known as the Dieselgate scandal. This paper asks whether this reputational shock affected international trade in diesel-powered cars, focusing on intra-European exports. Using product-level bilateral trade data and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find a significant and persistent decline in exports of German diesel cars (~17%) starting a year after the scandal; French diesel exports fall in the short term but fade out. Exploiting cross-country variation in exposure (press coverage, Google searches) and reaction (tweet sentiment), we show that better-informed countries penalized German diesel less, consistent with more accurate belief updating. The results shed light on how reputational shocks propagate through trade and on the role of information and brand image in shaping consumer responses.

Maritime transport is a cornerstone of globalization but also a major source of localized air pollution in port cities. We exploit the Red Sea crisis of December 2023—an abrupt geopolitical shock that sharply reduced vessel arrivals in European ports—to identify the causal effect of maritime traffic on urban pollution. Combining ship-level AIS with high-frequency pollution and weather data for 613 ports, we estimate that shipping substantially increases nitrogen oxides: a 1,000 DWT rise in hourly traffic raises daily NO₂ by 0.025 µg/m³, with effects detectable up to 10 km. Counterfactuals suggest shipping accounts for around 8% of ambient NO₂ on average and over 50% in major hubs. We find no robust causal effects for SO₂ or PM, pointing to NOx as the primary local externality of shipping. Port-level designs reveal much sharper effects than city-wide analyses, indicating that naive city-scale designs understate true external costs.