"Editorial Essay: Introduction to a Special Issue on Improving Private Regulation of Labor In Global Supply Chains: Theory And Evidence", August 2020

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The articles in this special issue advance debates by identifying the scope for improvement in private regulation at three different levels. At the micro level, they contribute by showing how the core components of private regulation—monitoring, creating incentives through commercial relationships, and diffusing practices—work, or do not work, in practice. At the meso level, they show how specific attributes of institutional contexts enable or constrain private regulation. And at the macro level, they show how new structures and institutions in private regulation emerge and evolve. A commonality among the articles in this special issue is that they are the result of years of effort by the authors to obtain novel data. All of these articles have overcome the difficult challenge of doing grounded research on private regulation, given that most companies and multi- stakeholder institutions in the ecosystem do not share data publicly regard- ing their private regulation efforts, nor do they provide researchers access. By doing so, these authors shed new empirical light on fundamental questions that have remained elusive to researchers and policymakers...