Investment arbitrations should not happen too often, because they are costly processes for both parties. Yet they regularly happen. Why? We investigate the hypothesis that investment arbitrations are used as a means of last resort, after dissuasion has failed, and that dissuasion is most likely to fail in situations were significant political risk materializes. Investment arbitration should thus tend to target countries in which certain types of political risk has materialized. In order to test this hypothesis, we focus in this paper on two drivers of political risk: bad governance, and economic crises. We test various links between those two drivers of risk and arbitration claims. We use an original dataset that includes investment claims filed under the rules of all arbitration institutions as well as ad hoc arbitrations. We find that bad governance, understood as corruption and lack of rule of law (using the WGI Corruption and WGI Rule of Law indexes), has a statistically significant relation with investment arbitration claims, but economic crises do not.

中文翻译：

---

政治风险和投资仲裁：一项实证研究*

投资仲裁不应经常发生，因为这对双方来说都是代价高昂的过程。然而，它们经常发生。为什么？我们调查了以下假设，即投资仲裁被用作劝阻失败后的最后手段，并且劝阻最有可能在出现重大政治风险的情况下失败。因此，投资仲裁应倾向于针对某些类型的政治风险已经发生的国家。为了检验这一假设，我们在本文中关注政治风险的两个驱动因素：治理不善和经济危机。我们测试了风险和仲裁索赔这两个驱动因素之间的各种联系。我们使用原始数据集，其中包括根据所有仲裁机构的规则以及临时仲裁提交的投资索赔。