Lorenzo Crippa

Hi! I am a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow, where I am also affiliated with the Global Sustainable Development theme in the Advanced Research Centre. From January 2025 I’ll be Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Political Economy at the University of Strathclyde. I obtained my PhD in 2022 at the University of Essex. I am interested in international regulatory politics and the governance of multinational companies (MNCs). I focus particularly on corporate crime and environmental regulation.

My PhD thesis has investigated the international political economy of regulations against corporate corruption. I have studied the effects of anti-bribery regulations on companies’ foreign investment and portfolio performance. I showed that countries can leverage rules agreed-upon under the umbrella of international agreements to impose regulatory costs, thus deterring misconduct and pushing their regulatory reach beyond borders. I argued that, under international agreements, states can wield regulations against MNCs’ foreign crime by leveraging the very cross-border corporate networks that firms use to further criminal activity. I studied scope and limits of this regulatory strategy.

My current research expands my interest on regulatory politics and the governance of MNCs beyond corporate bribery. I currently apply similar conceptual tools developed in my PhD to focus on environmental regulation and international climate negotiations. Methodologically, I apply computational methods for causal inference and text analysis to the study of regulatory politics and global governance.