1,720,963 research outputs found
THE VOLUNTARY CARBON MARKET: A Law and Economics Analysis
Get PDFAccording to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), carbon dioxide removals are considered essential across all pathways to meet the 1.5°C Paris Agreement goal. Nevertheless, scaling up these removals to deliver tangible results requires significant financing. The voluntary carbon market (VCM), supported by private investments, has the potential to contribute to this goal.
In recent years, the surge in climate commitments made by corporations has led to a substantial increase in the use of carbon offsets from the VCM to meet these climate goals. This trend has fueled the expansion and growth of the VCM.
Despite the increasing relevance of carbon offsets in corporate sustainability plans, legal scholars have often overlooked the VCM and the corporate use of VCM carbon offsets. This thesis aims to fill this gap by exploring the challenges associated with the corporate use of VCM carbon offsets in fulfilling climate pledges, with a particular focus on the risks of greenwashing stemming from over-crediting and misleading advertising.
It also evaluates legislative and judicial responses to these challenges, assessing the effectiveness of existing regulations governing climate claims that rely on carbon offsets. Against this backdrop, this thesis proposes a dual-claim framework designed to mitigate greenwashing risks and strengthen the reputational constraints on VCM market players. Specifically, it advocates for the use of nature-based projects in contribution claims and technological carbon removals in compensation claims.
On the one hand, corporations willing to invest in nature-based carbon offsets should be permitted to do so by establishing contribution claims based on a “money-for-money” approach. This solution can promote private investment in projects aimed at preserving natural resources while mitigating the risk of over-crediting.
On the other hand, the thesis advocates for the use of technological removals in compensatory claims. Although these solutions are more expensive, they provide a more verifiable and reliable pathway for meeting climate targets, effectively addressing the shortcomings of nature-based approaches.
This proposed framework seeks to enhance confidence in the VCM by reducing the risk of greenwashing and promoting greater transparency and accountability in corporate climate initiatives. Simultaneously, it refrains from imposing undue restrictions on companies, enabling them to adopt credible and effective strategies to meet their climate commitments
The voluntary carbon market: market failures and policy implications
No full textMany companies have made environmental pledges and
launched products that claim to be carbon neutral. In most of
these instances, corporations rely on carbon offsets. In this
Article, we investigate the functioning of the market on which
these offsets are created and exchanged, namely the voluntary
carbon market, and look into the question of whether and, if
so, how it should be subject to regulation. We start by
shedding light on the mechanics of this market and then
explain why a well-functioning voluntary carbon market is
necessary to fight global warming and can also help
developing countries build less carbon-intensive economies.
However, we also spotlight the conflicts of interest and
imperfect information problems that plague the voluntary
carbon market and prevent it from achieving its full potential.
Further, we explain why the proposals advanced by some
members of Congress to regulate this market are misguided.
Finally, we offer a proposal that can contribute to improving
the functioning of the voluntary carbon market, thus increasing the likelihood that firms will rely on high-quality offsets to reach their climate goals
Dual Class Shares in the Era of Common Ownership
No full textDual class shares and the anticompetitive effects of common ownership are two of the most discussed corporate governance issues of our time. In this Article, we identify a hidden connection between them, which allows us to derive policy implications that are relevant for both.
The traditional debate on dual class shares is based on the trade-off between having visionary founders firmly in control of the firm and the risk that they extract private benefits of control. We show that the exclusive focus on this trade-off is rooted on the outdated assumption that all shareholders are firm-value-maximizing (FVM), that is, aim at maximizing the value of the firm in which they have invested. But, as the debate on common ownership acknowledges, diversified institutional investors à la BlackRock care about maximizing the value of their funds’ portfolios, irrespective of what happens to any individual investee company: they act as portfolio-value-maximizing (PVM) shareholders. Consequently, they might prefer a lower level of competition in product markets to maximize the joint value of the competitors that are in their portfolio.
In present-day financial markets, dominated by PVM institutional investors, dual class shares can then serve the additional purpose of allowing insiders to silence PVM shareholders, thus mitigating the anticompetitive effects of common ownership. For this reason, we argue against banning dual class shares, or even introducing a mandatory time-based sunset.
But that is not the end of the story. The ongoing climate crisis is showing that a relatively low number of major carbon emitters can impose gigantic externalities on the planet. The macroeconomics literature, in turn, has provided ample evidence that a subset of systemically important firms can affect the whole economy. Allowing these companies to have dual class shares without limitations grants FVM shareholders à la Zuckerberg the unfettered ability to inflict systemic harm on society. If limitations were imposed on such shares, PVM shareholders would internalize part of these externalities via their other portfolio holdings, and hence have the incentive to steer individual portfolio firms into being mindful of these externalities.
Thus, we suggest that there should be limits placed on the use of dual class shares by systemically relevant firms and show how such limitations ought to be tailored according to a firm’s specific ability to impose systemic externalities
People can understand IPCC visuals and are not influenced by colors
Get PDFWe carry out two online experiments with large representative samples of the US population to study key climate visuals included in the Sixth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In the first study (N = 977), we test whether people can understand such visuals, and we investigate whether color consistency within and across visuals influences respondents' understanding, their attitudes toward climate change and their policy preferences. Our findings reveal that respondents exhibit a remarkably good understanding of the IPCC visuals. Given that IPCC visuals convey complex multi-layered information, our results suggest that the clarity of the visuals is extremely high. Moreover, we observe that altering color consistency has limited impact on the full sample of respondents, but affects the understanding and the policy preferences of respondents who identify as Republicans. In the second study (n = 1169), we analyze the role played by colors' semantic discriminability, that is the degree to which observers can infer a unique mapping between the color and a concept (for instance red and warmth have high semantic discriminability). We observe that semantic discriminability does not affect attitudes toward climate change or policy preferences and that increasing semantic discriminability does not improve understanding of the climate visual
Extending the concept of consumer to minority shareholders : towards a reform of derivative actions
No full textAward date: 30 September 2021Supervisor: Prof. Mathias Siems (European University Institute)Nowadays, collective redress represents one of the most versatile and effective remedies of protecting consumers (and others) in private law, capable of safeguarding and providing judicial protection even to those rights which would have otherwise been neglected by their legitimated but disincentivised owners. This thesis investigates the possibility of extending the concept of consumer to minority shareholders, including their ability to file a complaint against the company’s board and, in turn, it suggests applying some of the incentives found in the class action regulation for consumers in Europe to collective action in company law. Specifically, this thesis focuses on derivative actions, a potentially powerful collective tool used by minority shareholders, whose interests have been infringed by negligent decisions and misbehaviour of the company’s directors. It aims to demonstrate the possible benefits of applying legislation on consumers’ class actions to minority shareholders and to existing derivative actions, both as a way to protect small shareholders and as a deterrent rule. This solution would allow an easier access to justice and, in addition, should also act as a deterrent, preventing misbehaviour and abusive decisions from the board of directors, becoming a form of private enforcement and improving the governance of the company. The research analyses the legislation of three EU Member States: it analyses the German, Italian and Slovenian regulations, by connecting both the “Musterfeststellungsklage” and the provisions found in the “Aktiengesetz”, the corresponding legislation in the Italian system in particular “L. 31 del 12/04/2019” and the art. 2393 bis c.c., as well as the Slovenian Law of Collective Actions (Zakon o kolektivnih tožbah) and the člen 328 (1) ZDG (Zakon o gospodarskih družbah). Since the derivative action can be regarded as a simpler version of the class action, where the interests carried by shareholders are homogeneous, this thesis suggests that they are broadly equivalent tools of enforcement. Consequently, by comparing them, this thesis suggests that the derivative action can benefit from some of the legislative expedients and incentives of the consumers’ class action regulation such as for example: (i) lowering the quantitative requirements needed for filing the claim, (ii) diversifying the diffuse active legitimacy by enabling qualified bodies such as shareholders’ associations and organisations to represent their members in court and (iii) shifting the burden of costs that should be carried by the abovementioned qualified bodies and/or the companies but not by the shareholders themselves
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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