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Building a more sustainable investment system
No full textThis concluding chapter argues that sustainable investment as currently designed is insufficient to meet global challenges, primarily due to persistent market failures around externalities, common pool resources, and public goods. The chapter explains how financial incentives drive investment decisions and why meaningful progress requires correcting these market failures through state intervention and policy advocacy by financial actors themselves. The chapter concludes with a powerful call to action for sustainable investment professionals, outlining seven essential practices from critical self-reflection to stakeholder accountability. It challenges practitioners to move beyond cautious business case building toward proactive, evidence-based approaches that acknowledge justice implications and deliver substantive contributions to sustainability outcomes
Advancing applied behavioral science: the GAP framework
Get PDFGrowing acceptance of applied behavioral science in public policy and organizational decision-making has resulted in ambitions to go beyond nudging, particularly following developments in new technologies. To support these ambitions, this paper presents the GAP framework. Building from established behavioral science concepts (General Tools), GAP incorporates new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) into the behavioral science toolkit (Algorithms), as well as practical considerations for implementing behavioral science within organizational settings (Practical Considerations). The framework unifies diagnostic, design, and scalability considerations to support practitioners in tailoring behavioral capacities to their organizational contexts. GAP is developed as a ‘modular’ framework, allowing practitioners to draw on its insights to supplement existing knowledge and adapt knowledge to organizational demands
Specification testing for binary choice model via maximum score
No full textThis paper proposes a Hausman-type statistic to the test specification of a parametric binary choice model by comparing the maximum likelihood estimator and the maximum score estimator. Although the convergence rates are different, it is still meaningful to compare these estimators to detect misspecification of parametric models. A simulation study illustrates that the proposed test offers better size properties than the conventional information matrix test, and exhibits reasonable power against common forms of misspecification, such as heavy-tailed distributions and heteroskedasticity
We need a global assessment of avoidable climate-change risks
No full textTo understand the urgency of emissions reductions, policymakers and citizens need a full analysis of what is at stak
The global network of liquidity lines
No full textAt the end of 2025, there were 177 cross-border liquidity lines between central banks connecting countries that accounted for 81% of world GDP. This paper maps the evo lution of these arrangements since 2000. We show that the lines form a network through which banks can indirectly obtain access to the USD even when their cen tral bank has no agreement with the Federal Reserve. These indirect connections give the People’s Bank of China a central role and show the fragility of liquidity provision to geopolitical tensions. We present cross-country evidence that the indirect connec tions reduce CIP deviations at the tails, and causal evidence that liquidity lines are substitutes to FX reserves
Essays on labour market power
No full textThis thesis consists of three essays examining the causes and consequences of labour market power. In the first chapter, I develop a tractable model of entrepreneurship with monopsonistic labour markets and endogenous technology adoption, offering a novel perspective on the general equilibrium effects of imperfect competition. By reducing wages below the competitive level, labour market power increases self-selection into entrepreneurship, reducing average firm size and, thus, limiting the diffusion of fixed cost technologies. The proposed theory generates a set of testable predictions, validated with novel evidence from Italian microdata. Calibrating the model with estimates of wage markdowns and survey data on IT adoption reveals substantial losses in aggregate productivity. The second chapter — joint with Tito Boeri, Peter John Lambert, and Paolo Naticchioni — studies the causal impact of the diffusion of remote work on labour market power, connecting to an extensive literature which highlights distaste for commuting as a key source of rent extraction for local employers. The analysis combines job postings, administrative records, and financial statements. Exploiting the heterogeneity in shifts to remote work across occupations (instrumented with shifts observed abroad) and the heterogeneity in occupational shares across commuting zones and industries, we implement a shift-share design and identify a significant effect of remote work on labour market competition. Finally, the last chapter — joint with Matthias Mertens — explores firm heterogeneity in market power. Combining financial statements with survey data on firm-level prices, we find that larger firms exhibit lower markups, although they are overcompensated by substantially higher wage markdowns. We explain our divergence from prior studies by showing how labour market power critically distorts markup estimates
Higher education predicts global cultural similarity to WEIRD countries
No full textBehavioral scientists increasingly recruit participants from less-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies, but continue to oversample highly educated people, such as university students and online workers. Here we test how representative highly educated individuals are of the world’s cultural diversity. We used the cultural fixation index (CFST) to measure cultural distance between people with high and low socioeconomic status in 95 countries (N = 268,992), across beliefs, values, and behaviors assessed by the World Values Survey (2005–2022). We find that more highly educated people are significantly more culturally similar to WEIRD countries, such as the Anglosphere and Western Europe. Education was not statistically significantly associated with cultural similarities to other large, culturally and politically influential countries, such as China, Russia, and India. Contrary to modernization theories, income and self-reported subjective status did not show the same pattern of WEIRD cultural similarity. Our results suggest that cross-cultural samples of students or university-educated individuals over-represent cultural values that are typical of WEIRD countries
Weak convergence of stochastic integrals on Skorokhod space in Skorokhod's J1 and M1 topologies
No full textMedical absenteeism and premature death in spinal muscular atrophy in Sweden: a population-based matched register study of people of working age
Get PDFIntroduction: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a rare, progressive, neuromuscular disorder that leads to loss of motor and respiratory function, affecting the individual’s ability to work and life expectancy. The magnitude of productivity losses due to medical absenteeism and premature death associated with SMA is unknown. We estimated the productivity losses attributable to SMA in a working age population compared with the general working age population in Sweden. Methods: This was a population-based, 1:4 matched cohort study of patients with SMA aged ≥ 18 years identified in the Swedish National Patient Registry from 2007 to 2019. Amongst those of working age (18–65 years), morbidity-induced productivity losses compared with a matched-reference cohort were estimated as the difference in the number of workdays lost attributable to SMA, monetised using mean income. Mortality-induced productivity losses were estimated as foregone lifetime earnings due to premature deaths for individuals with SMA compared with matched references, after adjusting for sex, age, and background unemployment. Results: Overall, 172 adult patients with SMA were identified. Amongst those of working age, their average annual medical absenteeism was 100 days (95% confidence interval 61.5–138.1) higher than that of their references, leading to morbidity-induced productivity losses of €31,638 per patient per year alive whilst of productive age, of which €25,650 was directly attributable to SMA. Average mortality-induced productivity losses due to premature death were €108,253 for men and €87,160 for women with SMA. Conclusions: Productivity losses due to medical absenteeism and premature mortality place a significant burden on adult patients with SMA of working age and Swedish society