Kick‐starting diffusion: Explaining the varying frequency of preferential trade agreements’ environmental provisions by their initial conditions

Most recent preferential trade agreements ( PTA s) include environmental provisions. While a number of these environmental provisions remain rare and are incorporated in just a few PTA s, others are widely popular and are duplicated in more than 100 PTA s. We still lack a convincing explanation for this varying frequency. While the diffusion literature typically tries to explain how diffusion occurs, we investigate why certain provisions diffuse...