1,720,982 research outputs found
Corporate carbon reduction pledges: beyond greenwashing
No full textClimate change is widely recognised as one of society's most profound challenges. In facing that challenge, the role of businesses is central. Corporations have a crucial role to play in mitigating climate change by reducing their net emissions and by driving the innovation and adaptation that are necessary to bring about a net zero economy. This volume brings together leading thinkers to evaluate the contribution that business law has made, and could make, to help drive such change.
The contributions are organized under 4 broad themes:
· Climate Change Disclosures and Net Zero Commitments
· Climate Change: Exit or Voice
· Climate Change in the Boardroom
· Climate Change in the Courtroo
Green Pills: Making Corporate Climate Commitments Credible
No full textMany of the world’s largest firms are now announcing plans to reduce their carbon emissions over the coming decades. Against the backdrop of lackadaisical climate policy, this development is widely held out as positive. But ubiquitous allegations of corporate and investor greenwashing raise the question of just how credible these announcements really are. After all, even when firms propose rigorous emission reduction targets, the shifting sands of investor preferences raise the risk that companies eventually renege. Given the rising proportion of investors with climate-conscious preferences, this leaves money on the table: firms engaging in a genuine transition away from high-emission activity should benefit from higher valuations, creating a business case to commit credibly.
Conventional mechanisms to generate such credible climate commitments––climate disclosures, corporate governance reforms, or changes to the corporate purpose––are inadequate to achieve that goal. Instead, we propose a suite of contractual mechanisms, which we term “green pills,” to make climate commitments credible by endogenizing incentives to meet climate targets. We argue that their adoption does not contravene directors’ fiduciary duties and requires no change to corporate law. Green pills thus help firms and their investors undertake credible climate commitments and show other stakeholders how serious they really are about their contribution to tackling climate change
Mandatory corporate climate disclosures: now, but how?
Full text linkMitigating the worst consequences of climate change by transitioning to a net zero economy requires investment on a large scale. Directly pricing emissions, the first-best solution to drive capital reallocation, is considered politically infeasible—so policymakers put their currency in facilitating the pricing of climate risk by investors. Yet investors, faced with scientific and policy uncertainty around climate risks compounded by a lack of information about companies’ exposures, struggle to do just that. This essay shows that current disclosure policies do not require companies to disclose the information that investors need to price climate risk, and voluntary frameworks like the TCFD—important as they are—have failed to turn the tide. The result is mispricing and a misallocation of capital, which harms investors and hampers the net zero transition. Against that context, this essay argues that traditional securities regulation rationales and net zero imperatives call for mandatory corporate climate disclosures. To create a yardstick against which governments’ proposals can be evaluated, both to support their efforts and to call out policy greenwashing, it outlines several design principles that go beyond the emerging consensus and cover the regulatory architecture that supports such a disclosure regime
Green Pills: Making Corporate Climate Commitments Credible
No full textMany of the world’s largest firms are now announcing plans to reduce their carbon emissions over the coming decades. Against the backdrop of lackadaisical climate policy, this development is widely held out as positive. But ubiquitous allegations of corporate and investor greenwashing raise the question of just how credible these announcements really are. After all, even when firms propose rigorous emission reduction targets the shifting sands of investor preferences raise the risk that companies eventually renege. Given the rising proportion of investors with climate-conscious preferences, this leaves money on the table: firms engaging in a genuine transition away from high-emission activity should benefit from higher valuations, creating a business case to commit credibly.
Conventional mechanisms to generate such credible climate commitments – climate disclosures, corporate governance reforms, or changes to the corporate purpose – are inadequate to achieve that goal. Instead, we propose a suite of contractual mechanisms, which we term “green pills,” to make climate commitments credible by endogenizing incentives to meet climate targets. We argue that their adoption does not contravene directors’ fiduciary duties and requires no change to corporate law. Green pills thus help firms and their investors undertake credible climate commitments and show other stakeholders how serious they really are about their contribution to tackling climate change
Network-sensitive financial regulation
Full text linkShocks that hit part of the financial system, such as the subprime mortgage market in 2007, can propagate through a complex network of interconnections among financial and non-fmancial institutions. As the financial crisis of 2007-2009 has shown, the consequences for the entire economy of such systemic risk materializing can be catastrophic. Following the crisis, economists and policymakers have become increasingly aware that the structure of the financial system is a key determinant of systemic risk. A wide consensus now exists among them that network theory is the natural framework for studying systemic risk. Yet, most of the existing rules in financial regulation are still "atomistic, " in that they fail to incorporate the fact that each individual institution is part of a wider network.
This Article shows that policies building upon insights from network theory (network-sensitive policies) can address systemic risk more effectively than traditional atomistic policies, also in areas where an atomistic approach would seem natural, such as the corporate governance of systemically important financial institutions. In particular, we consider four prescriptions for the governance of systemically important institutions (one on directors' liability, two on executive compensation and one on failing financial institutions' shareholders appraisal rights in mergers) and show how making them network-sensitive would both increase their effectiveness in taming systemic risk and better calibrate their impact on individual institutions
Prudential implications of intrafirm structure: the segmentation of global systemically important banks
No full textModern finance is increasingly dominated by large financial firms made up of many legal entities. This trend is particularly pronounced for global systemically important banks (G-SIBs), which often have over a thousand subsidiaries that are connected through a complex and opaque web of wide- ranging explicit and tacit relationships. There is widespread acceptance that such complex intrafirm structures affect a G-SIB’s risk profile, but the nature of these risks are only superficially understood. This thesis articulates a framework for characterising intrafirm structures and applies that framework to G-SIBs to explore the relationship between intrafirm structure and prudential risk.
The thesis yields three important contributions to scholarly and public policy debates surrounding the regulation of G-SIBs. First, the thesis develops an analytical framework rooted in network theory that facilitates the qualitative and quantitative characterisation and study of intrafirm structures. Second, the thesis elucidates the sources of intrafirm segmentation along entity lines and, building on the network-based framework proposed to study intrafirm structures, develops a tractable approach to study the consequences of intrafirm segmentation for a G-SIB’s risk profile. Third, drawing on a case study of the UK ring-fencing regime, the thesis explores the central role of intrafirm governance to the success of regulatory intrafirm segmentation policies and highlights how intrafirm governance may create unique vulnerabilities to their credibility
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
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