Portail HAL HEC
Not a member yet
4784 research outputs found
Sort by
Lost in Transition: Financial Barriers to Green Growth
No full textGreen innovation offers a solution to climate change without compromising living standards. Yet the share of climate-enhancing innovations in total patents, after booming for two decades, has seized to grow since the Global Financial Crisis. We develop a quantitative framework in which firms direct innovation towards green or polluting technologies, and become better at innovating in technologies that they have previously succeeded in. This causes mature, incumbent firms to predominantly innovate in polluting technologies. When green technologies become more attractive, e.g. due to a carbon tax, young firms are responsible for a large share of the transition to green innovation. As young firms are financially constrained, a credit shock harms their innovation, bringing the green transition to a halt. We validate the theory with two empirical exercises. First, we use micro data to provide causal evidence that tight credit disproportionately affects green innovation, through its effect on young firms. Second, we show that contractionary monetary policy shocks have a significantly larger effect on green patenting than non-green patenting, in line with the model. Quantifying the model, we find that tight credit can explain around 60% of the recent slowdown in the rise of green patenting. This translates to a cumulative increase in emissions by half a year of the initial (high pollution) steady state
All Hat and No Cattle? ESG Incentives in Executive Compensation
No full textThis paper examines the integration of ESG performance metrics into executive compensation using a detailed panel dataset of European executives. Despite becoming more widespread, most ESG metrics are largely discretionary, carry immaterial weights in payout calculations, and contribute little to executive pay risk. Such ESG metrics with arguably weak incentive power are common in financial firms and large companies, particularly for their most visible executives, which seems consistent with greenwashing. In contrast, binding ESG metrics with significant weights, which have potential to influence incentives, are only found in sectors with a large environmental footprint
Disentangling Drivers of Ambiguity Attitudes *
No full textA popular framework for ambiguity represents alternatives of choice as twostage gambles reflecting the uncertainty about the true probability on the state space. In this framework, ambiguity-averse behaviour could be driven by differences in utilities between stages-as in the smooth ambiguity model (Klibanoff et al., 2005)-or by non-linear probability weighting-as in a line of research initiated by Segal (1987). The present paper investigates the relevance of these distinct drivers of ambiguity attitudes in a two-stage setup by estimating a generalization of the smooth ambiguity model incorporating probability weighting. Our experiment reveals the relevance of both factors to describing ambiguity attitudes. We also report evidence of stakes-dependence of ambiguity attitudes, as implied by utility-driven approaches
Behavior Toward Newcomers and Contributions to Online Communities
No full textIn this paper, we study whether and how behavior toward newcomers impacts their socialization outcomes in terms of retention and quality of contributions in online communities. By exploiting a natural experiment on a large deal-sharing platform, we find that an intervention that proactively reminds other community members to be more considerate of newcomers causes newcomer deals to receive 54% more comments with a more positive sentiment. The newcomers are 10% more likely to post another deal, suggesting an increase in retention. However, we do not observe any effect of the intervention on the quality of subsequent contributions. Our evidence suggests that the intervention merely caused a temporary shock to newcomers' first contributions but did not improve their learning or motivate greater efforts. We draw implications on the design of socialization processes to help communities improve the retention and performance of newcomers
Banking Regulation and Sovereign Default Risk: How Regulation Undermines Rules
No full textBanking regulation invites banks to gamble when buying government bonds that regulators consider to be risk-free. The adverse effects on financial stability are known. In turn, this study shows that governments have an incentive to use banking regulation in order to enhance their fiscal leeway. We examine an unintended side-effect of banking regulation, namely the zero-risk weighting of sovereign bonds, which leads to lower costs of borrowing, encourages over-borrowing, and undermines constitutional fiscal rules. Our empirical analysis, by estimating local projections, examines the reaction of the fiscal balance in euro area periphery countries to a restrictive macroprudential capital regulation shock. We find that, unlike in the US, euro area banks’ share of domestic government bond holdings increases after the shock. This feeds into cheaper and more government borrowing laying bare the undesired interaction between banking regulation and constitutional rules. By comparing the US with the European Union, there is plausibility that the US implemented regulatory treatment and fiscal constitutional rules in a fashion that is better able to minimize the negative spillovers from banking regulation on sovereign borrowing. By contrast, the EU would benefit from more risk-based macroprudential regulation and a more credible constitutional no-bailout regime for sub-federal entities
Rotating Presidencies, Rotating Sponsors? Corporate Sponsorship of the Presidencies of the Council of the EU under Scrutiny
No full textPrivate sponsorships of the rotating Presidencies of the Council of the European Union is a relatively recent phenomenon. Yet over the last decade it has quickly become the norm, rather than the exception. Historically, the declared rationale underlying the acceptance of sponsorships is to meet some of the costs associated with the burden of holding the rotating Presidency and hosting related events. Moreover, Member States typically justify their practice of being opened to – or actively seeking – private sponsorship by hinting to the precedents set by previous Presidencies. Yet such a practice has increasingly become contested. What risks – if any – does private sponsorship entail in terms of interference in the decision-making process? To what extent does it diminish public trust towards the EU? Can these risks be prevented – or at least mitigated – and what type of regulation could one envision? To what extent the existing Council’s policy is adequate to prevent those risks?This chapter intends to address these questions by providing an historical and legal examination of the genesis, evolution, and contested nature of private sponsorships of rotating Presidencies of the Council of the EU in the last years. It does so by contextualising it within the broader debate about whether and how to subject the Council to a dedicated public ethics and integrity regime, analogous to those existing respectively within the European Commission and the European Parliament
Philanthropy’s Commitment With the Future
No full textHistorically philanthropic efforts focus not only on immediate needs and crisis response but also on strategic and forward-thinking interventions to address root causes and create enduring change. Yet, contrary to its original, characteristic long-term ambition, the philanthropic sector is no exception to the trend of neglecting the long-term. Today philanthropy’s self-imposed evaluation methods on the impact sought tend to prioritize the short and medium terms over the long one. Philanthropy’s obsession with metrics such as KPIs reduces the chances for grantees to operate for – and attain – long term transformations. More critically, being themselves the expression of dominant economic and social systems – as embodied by conservative boards, elitism and preferences for mainstream topics - foundations are deeply embedded into shortermism.Hence there is not only a need for philanthropy to rethinking its own approach to the long-term in its giving - by systematically imagining and crafting alternative scenarios for a more equitable and sustainable world –, but also the opportunity to structurally alter the short-termism embedded into our systems. This essay calls to the philanthropic sector to renew its original commitment with the future, by providing some recommendations. It concludes that for philanthropy the future generations’ agenda is about reconciling itself with its original long-term perspective, by committing to embed future thinking and foresight not only within itself but also within governments across the world
Allocation of IP Control Rights and Effective Technology Commercialization at Universities
No full textThis report to the "Investigation on development of the innovation and entrepreneurship climate in Sweden" SOU 2016:72 regards governmental policies for university technology commercialization. It contains a literature review that spans several areas of research addressing the potential effect of changing the allocation of Intellectual Property rights between universities and their employees. There is also some original research; several secondary datasets are re‐analyzed and some primary interview and case data from a few universities are also added
The value of research activities ‘other than’ publishing articles: Reflections on an experimental workshop series
No full textPurpose:The purpose of this essay is to explore the opportunities and challenges that Early-Career Researchers (ECRs) face when they seek to contribute to academic knowledge production through research activities “other than” those directly focused on making progress with their own, to-be published, research papers in a context associated with the “publish or perish” mentality.Design/methodology/approach: Drawing broadly on the notion of technologies of humility (Jasanoff, 2003), this reflective essay develops upon the experiences of the authors in organizing and participating in a series of nine workshops undertaken between June 2013 and April 2021 as well as the arduous process of writing this paper itself. Retrospective accounts, workshop materials, email exchanges, and surveys of workshop participants provide the key data sources for the analysis presented in the paper.Findings: The paper shows how the organization of the workshops is intertwined with the building of a small community of ECRs and exploration of how to address the perceived limitations of a “gap spotting” approach to developing research ideas and questions. The analysis foregrounds how the workshops provide a seemingly valuable research experience that is not without contradictions. Workshop participation reveals tensions between engagement in activities “other than” working on papers for publication and institutionalized pressures to produce publication outputs, between the (weak) perceived status of ECRs in the field and the aspiration to make a scholarly contribution, and between the desire to develop a personally satisfying intellectual journey and the pressure to respond to requirements that allow access to a wider community of scholars.Originality/value:Our analysis contributes to debates about the ways in which seemingly valuable outputs are produced in academia despite a pervasive “publish or perish” mentality. The analysis also shows how reflexive writing can help to better understand the opportunities and challenges of pursuing activities that might be considered “unproductive” because they are not directly related to to-be published papers
Diversity-Preserving K-Armed Bandits, Revisited
No full textInternational audienceWe consider the bandit-based framework for diversity-preserving recommendations introduced by Celis et al. (2019), who approached it in the case of a polytope mainly by a reduction to the setting of linear bandits. We design a UCB algorithm using the specific structure of the setting and show that it enjoys a bounded distribution-dependent regret in the natural cases when the optimal mixed actions put some probability mass on all actions (i.e., when diversity is desirable). The regret lower bounds provided show that otherwise, at least when the model is mean-unbounded, a regret is suffered. We also discuss an example beyond the special case of polytopes