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ESMA’s sustainable finance soft law—fuel for the green Capital Markets Union
No full textThe European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), one of the European Union (EU) agencies responsible for financial supervision, operates at the intersection of two key EU strategies: the Capital Markets Union (CMU) and the Sustainable Finance Action Plan. While ESMA has limited binding powers, its regulatory activities rely heavily on soft law—an agile regulatory tool ideally suited for sustainable finance due to its flexibility and responsiveness. This article explores how ESMA’s soft law instruments—such as guidelines, questions and answers, no-action letters, and supervisory tools—can address the regulatory challenges of both strategies and facilitate the development of the ‘green CMU’. It highlights the role of soft law in promoting supervisory convergence and integrating environmental, social, and governance markets, while also acknowledging associated risks
An atlas of educational inequality in Italy: outcomes, disparities and opportunities
Get PDFWe present an in-depth analysis of educational inequality in Italy, focusing on disparities in educational outcomes and opportunities across different socio-economic, gender, and migration backgrounds. Leveraging administrative longitudinal data, we construct a dataset of 386 small geographical areas with a sufficient sample size to assess the extent to which key ascriptive characteristics predict the mathematical achievement of Italian students in the 5th grade of primary school. Our findings highlight a substantial influence of ascriptive characteristics on students’ educational attainment, able to correctly predict out-of-sample up to 20% of the variability despite the relatively small sample size. We show significant geographical variation that previous studies, based on larger geographical aggregations, were unable to observe comprehensively. Additionally, we identify a weak yet negative trade-off between equality and average attainment, which is more pronounced in southern areas, where higher achievement is associated with greater variance and a stronger influence of ascriptive characteristics. Among the predictors, we find that mother’s education plays a predominant role in most of the country
The complementor perspective: examining how Dutch developers and industry professionals navigated Google Assistant as a platform (2018-2021)
No full textThis article examines the process of platformization from the perspective of platform complementors. It focusses on Dutch complementors—retailers, news organizations, transportation companies, and software start-ups—that developed Conversational Actions for Google Assistant. The analysis builds on a combination of digital fieldwork and interviews with Dutch developers, conversational specialists, and marketing and communication managers between 2018 and 2021. Pushing back against the dominant focus on successful platforms, we demonstrate that platformization needs to be understood as a balancing act, marked by frictions that arise in attempts to align expectations, interests, concerns, and objectives of different actors. Our findings show that complementors’ imaginaries of a Dutch assistant conflicted with Google’s global priorities, revealing the limits of localization in platform infrastructures. Moreover, we highlight the asymmetry between complementors’ expectation of a linear platform development and Google’s circular strategy of continuous reconfiguration of infrastructures and platforms to capture specific markets
The inference-forecast gap in belief updating
No full textEvidence from the laboratory and the field has uncovered both underreaction and overreaction to new information. We provide new experimental evidence on the underlying mechanisms of under- and overreaction by comparing how people make inferences and revise forecasts in the same information environment. Participants underreact to signals when inferring about underlying states, but overreact to the same signals when revising forecasts about future outcomes— a phenomenon we term “the inference-forecast gap.” We show that this gap is largely driven by different simplifying heuristics used in the two tasks. Additional treatments suggest that the choice of heuristics is affected by the similarity between statistics in the information environment and the statistic elicited by the belief-updating problem
Cultural variation in the structure of internal representations: testing the orthographic hypothesis
Get PDFCultural differences comprise not only outwardly observable behaviors, but also internal psychological traits. One poorly understood domain of cross-cultural psychological variation is the organization of internal mental representations, and how this variation arises from experiential differences. Such an understanding could help reveal fundamental ways in which culture shapes the mind. Here we use the Internal Representations Questionnaire (IRQ) to investigate cross-cultural differences in modalities of thought such as visual imagery and internal speech. We compare respondents in China and Japan to the original US sample, testing the preregistered hypothesis that the structure of internal representations is associated with variation in writing systems. We found evidence of differences in factor structure between the US sample and the Japanese and Chinese respondents. An exploratory factor analysis for the Chinese data revealed that some aspects of inner speech are statistically inseparable from orthographic imagery in this population—an outcome consistent with psycholinguistic and neuroimaging findings about the development of an orthography-to-semantics direct pathway in Chinese readers but not in alphabetic readers. These findings suggest the presence of meaningful cultural variation in the structure of internal representations, which may be a downstream consequence of variation in writing systems
Informal governance in hybrid federalism as a tool of containment, not transformation: the case of Nepal
No full textNepal’s 2015 federalization promised greater autonomy for marginalized groups, particularly the Madheshis. Yet rather than dispersing power, federalism has entrenched central dominance. This article investigates how this outcome emerged, drawing on interviews with hard-to-reach communities and critical analysis of Nepalese media. It reveals that informal coalition politics and judicial activism function not as constraints on central authority but as tools to sustain it. Crucially, Madheshi leaders invoke judicial authority to deflect accountability for blocked reforms while retaining access to federal power. The article introduces a novel argument: hybrid federalism should not be seen as a temporary or transitional phase, but as a durable political strategy that offers symbolic inclusion while obstructing substantive change. It challenges prevailing theories of institutional hybridity by showing how elites intentionally preserve hybrid arrangements to manage contestation without transformation. Nepal's case thus sheds new light on how institutional hybridity is deployed in the Global South
Tactile tensions: uncertainty, mutuality, and therianthropic nightmares in Highland Odisha
Get PDFIn the central highlands of Odisha, India, Kutia Kondh families navigate a precarious reality shaped by productive autonomy, decentralized authority, and material and relational uncertainty. Abundance and destitution are finely balanced in a world where humans, animals, ancestors, and spirits are co‐present and co‐dependent but also opaque and unpredictable. A significant amount of ‘tact’ is therefore required to create enduring links of mutuality whilst also respecting the autonomy of the parties involved. Tactful action appears at multiple scales: everyday relational negotiations, shamanic dialogues, and ritual sacrifice are attempts to bring the uncertainty and heterogeneity of life into some kind of temporary orbit. These tactful elicitations of mutuality are a way to manage the difficult dead, unsatiated spirits, and uncanny therianthropes – nightmares of unmanaged commensuration in a situation of intense more‐than‐human mutuality. While the Kutia have a long history of ‘segmentary egalitarianism’ in regional politics, the everyday management of relational precarity in Kutia villages is opposed to any sense of equality‐as‐equivalence. Kutia families ultimately grapple with different egalitarian registers in the mutualities of upland life. Alongside egalitarian boundary work in communal relations, there is the newer civic egalitarianism of the Odisha state – an egalitarian register at a much larger scale, accompanied by new nightmares of total, tactless commensuration
A framework for collaborative identification of geographical information for map-based dashboards to support pandemic response policy-making
No full textThis article presents an innovative collaborative value modeling process to engage policy-makers and other stakeholders in Portugal in discussing relevant geographic information for COVID-19 response. The process determines what geographic information should be included in map-based dashboards to effectively support public health authorities’ policy decisions and interventions in responding to the pandemic. It combined a Web-Delphi process with 56 health stakeholders and experts alongside virtual workshops with a core group of eight key players who discussed and refined the Delphi results. Seventy-seven geographic information elements related to incidence, community transmission, vaccination, transmissibility, testing, mortality and lethality, and resource allocation emerged as relevant to inform the pandemic response. The process provided structured and sound information–as seen by a large number of health professionals, experts, and policy-makers–on relevant geographic elements for dashboards to support pandemic-designed policies. These elements constitute a coherent body of spatial knowledge that advances geographic information science by informing the design of dashboards to support spatial decision-making. The proposed collaborative modeling process constitutes a framework that contributes to bridge the gap between generating geographic information and making pandemic-related decisions, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Portugal, but can be used in other map-based dashboard contexts
