Increasingly, sustainability standards are recognized as important tools for helping companies navigate the complex sustainability landscape. These standards help companies tackle their social and environmental challenges and serve as credible signals to stakeholders that they are doing the right thing, thus creating potential opportunities for the market to reward these companies. But what really… Read More »
Crypto assets exhibit considerable design and value proposition differences, ranging from inflation protection to facilitating more streamlined payments, ensuring censorship-resistant computing, and safeguarding property rights. Nevertheless, their prices often exhibit similar cyclical patterns. Surge periods with substantial returns have lured both retail and institutional investors. Meanwhile, the subsequent market downturns have garnered growing scrutiny from… Read More »
Text-based artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as GPT-4 enable tech-savvy laypeople to conduct tasks in complex domains with little prior experience. The financial sector, dealing with vast amounts of data daily, is among the industries most eagerly working on AI solutions. For example, Morgan Stanley’s asset management division was one of GPT-4’s first customers and… Read More »
Aligning financial market activity with policy and regulation interventions is necessary to foster an orderly transition to a carbon-free economy. For instance, within the European Green Deal strategy, the European Union Taxonomy provides firms, investors, and policymakers with detailed criteria to assess the environmental sustainability of economic activities concerning climate change mitigation and adaptation, among… Read More »
Green bonds are fixed-income securities issued by private corporations or public bodies (such as central banks or governments) to finance environmentally beneficial (“green”) projects. They are a relatively novel creation of international finance (what is considered the first ever green bond, the European Investment Bank’s “Climate Awareness Bond”, was created in 2007), but one that… Read More »
The importance of public policy has increased for investors since 2015, when governments committed to shifting trillions of dollars to be consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement and to increase investments in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Further, investors have accepted the influence of ESG factors on delivering financial returns, recognizing the need… Read More »
Demand for infrastructure investment continues to ramp up amid growing commitments to a low-carbon future and rapid economic growth in developing countries. The nature of this “scaling up” challenge requires capital that governments cannot provide alone, necessitating the utilization of private capital. Institutional investors collectively possess the financial resources ($16 trillion in “direct” investment capacity)… Read More »
On June 1, 2023, the European Parliament substantially amended the European Commission’s proposal for the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). Since my first comment on the Commission’s proposal, I have focused on Art. 22, establishing civil liability for failure to carry out due diligence. Functionally, this liability aims to counter multinational corporations’ strategic use… Read More »
There is a consensus that compliance is a critical issue in corporate governance. Yet there remains a gaping hole in our understanding of what determines the effectiveness of compliance programs. Specifically, we know relatively little about the role of third-party compliance advisors. Nowadays, virtually every large law firm or accounting firm sells various “compliance… Read More »
While Bitcoin is still the largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization, the Ethereum blockchain maintains the unique ability to tokenize assets and execute smart contracts. These benefits for businesses and investors also come with additional opportunities for cybercriminals, such as when a company simply runs away with the money after tokenizing its assets. … Read More »
