Andrew Lugg (Political Science) recently presented his co-authored paper, "Connecting Regimes: Preferential Trade Agreements and the Management of the Intellectual Property Rights Regime," at the plenary session of the 16th Annual Political Economy of International Organizations (PEIO) conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The paper develops a theory of how countries create "connections" to their preferred international institutions when they negotiate preferential trade agreements (PTAs). To test the theory the paper utilizes novel, hand-coded data on the connections to intellectual property rights institutions in over 500 PTAs.