Over the past year, three converging trends have put environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) topics at the center of yet another polarizing national debate. ESG Mainstreaming. The first is that investments that integrate ESG factors in some way have gone mainstream over the past decade. ESG is no longer limited to “sustainable, responsible, and impact”… Read More »
Due to market and regulatory failures, production activities often result in excessive pollution, which can cause damage to human health, property, and nature. According to the 2005 Survey of Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures, the US manufacturing sector invested $26.6 billion in pollution abatement activities. However, this amount is less than 1% of other investments,… Read More »
Companies and investors have increasingly focused on embedding Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations into their strategies. While the term ESG has no official definition and defies easy description, we define companies with an ESG strategy as those making a good faith commitment to managing ESG-related risks to enhance long-term shareholder value. To use the… Read More »
Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) has grown in popularity due to its promise that it will, as its name suggests, disintermediate traditional finance structures. Total Value Locked, which represents all deposits in various DeFi platforms, grew from $1 billion in June 2020 to a peak of almost $200 billion in November 2021. As of April 2023, almost… Read More »
In this blog post, we analyse tokenized deposits in terms of financial motivation, regulation, technological implementation, and interaction with retail and wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), with particular attention to the European perspective. We conclude that the tokenization of deposits is a crucial enabler for the success of future CBDCs and needs to enter… Read More »
The idea that industrial policy is back in vogue has become something of a cliché in recent years. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, and Justin Lin, a former Chief Economist of the World Bank, were onto the trend early, arguing in 2015, “today, the relevance and pertinence of industrial policies are acknowledged by… Read More »
The debate on whether environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting should be mandatory is ongoing and of growing importance for regulators. Different institutions are working on new mandatory ESG disclosures. For example, the European Union passed the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in 2014 and is now preparing to adopt the European Sustainability Reporting Standards… Read More »
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing has been gaining momentum in recent years as investors increasingly recognize the importance of incorporating ESG factors into their investment decisions. ESG investors rely on third party rating agencies that specialize in measuring the ESG performance of companies. There are many ESG rating agencies in the market and some… Read More »
Enacted in October of 2000, Regulation Fair Disclosure (“Reg FD”) was designed to level the informational playing field among investors by ensuring that issuers publicly disclose material information to the entire market and not just to a select few. Specifically, Reg FD requires that if a firm privately discloses material information, they must promptly disseminate… Read More »
In our digital age, cybersecurity plays a crucial role in resolving consumer concerns regarding data breaches. Nevertheless, United States copyright laws prohibit the effective use of cybersecurity tools that disrupt malicious hackers from accessing personal (and sensitive) information. One law that is especially detrimental to defending against malicious attackers is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act… Read More »
