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Highlights
• Pathways for a circular economy towards the EU goals require policy support that, in turn, requires legitimacy.
• Legitimacy is often contested in the public discourse at all phases in the technological innovation system.
• Legitimacy remains poorly understood for ‘in-between’ technologies that struggle to move from the formative to the growth stage.
• The article explores legitimacy for chemical recycling primarily based on evidence from the UK, Germany, and Italy.
Abstract
The European Commission aims to increase the recycling of plastic packaging to 60% by 2025, requiring fundamental changes towards a more circular economy. Pathways for this transition require policy support that largely depends on their legitimacy in the public discourse. These normative aspects remain poorly understood for ‘in-between’ technologies, i.e., technologies that are no longer novel but struggle to move to the growth phase within the technological innovation system. Therefore, we ask: How do discourses shape technology legitimacy for in-between technologies? Drawing on the empirical example of chemical recycling, the analysis renders two principal findings. First, legitimising and delegitimising storylines present contesting views on in-between technologies regarding their technological aspects, environmental and social impacts, and economic and policy implications. Second, how discourses contribute to technology legitimacy depends on the actors and interests that drive the prevalent storylines in particular contexts.
The 2011 Arab Spring marked the opening of the Central Mediterranean Route for irregular border crossings between Libya and Italy, which produced heterogeneous reductions of bilateral smuggling distances between country pairs in the Mediterranean region. We exploit this source of spatial and temporal variation in bilateral distance along land and sea routes to estimate the elasticity of irregular migration intentions for African and Near East countries. We estimate an elasticity of migration intentions to smuggling distances exceeding −3, mainly driven by countries with weak rule of law and high internet penetration. Our findings are consistent across irregular migration measures both at the aggregate and individual levels. We show that irregular migration elasticity is higher for youth, relatively skilled individuals and those with an informative advantage (having a social network abroad or a mobile phone).
In a unifying framework generalizing established theories we characterize under which conditions Joint Ownership of assets creates the best cooperation incentives in a partnership. We endogenise renegotiation costs and assume that they weakly increase with additional assets. A salient sufficient condition for optimal cooperation incentives among patient partners is if Joint Ownership is a Strict Coasian Institution for which transaction costs impede an efficient asset reallocation after a breakdown. In contrast to Halonen (2002) the logic behind our results is that Joint Ownership maximizes the value of the relationship and the costs of renegotiating ownership after a broken relationship.
In its first ten years (2014-2023), the banking union was successful in its prudential agenda but failed spectacularly in its underlying objective: establishing a single banking market in the euro area. This goal is now more important than ever, and easier to attain than at any time in the last decade. To make progress, cross-border banks should receive a specific treatment within general banking union legislation. Suggestions are made on how to make such regulatory carve-out effective and legally sound.
Central banks sowing the seeds for a green financial sector? NGFS membership and market reactions
(2024)
In December 2017, during the One Planet Summit in Paris, a group of eight central banks and supervisory authorities launched the “Network for Greening the Financial Sector” (NGFS) to address challenges and risks posed by climate change to the global financial system. Until 06/2023 an additional 69 central banks from all around the world have joined the network. We find that the propensity to join the network can be described as a function in the country’s economic development (e.g., GDP per capita), national institutions (e.g., central bank independence), and performance of the central bank on its mandates (e.g., price stability and output gap). Using an event study design to examine consequences of network expansions in capital markets, we document that a difference portfolio that is long in clean energy stocks and short in fossil fuel stocks benefits from an enlargement of the NGFS. Overall, our results suggest that an increasing number of central banks and supervisory authorities are concerned about climate change and willing to go beyond their traditional objectives, and that the capital market believes they will do so.
In this study, we unpack the ESG ratings of four prominent agencies in Europe and find that (i) each single E, S, G pillar explains the overall ESG score differently,(ii) there is a low co-movement between the three E, S, G pillars and (iii) there are specific ESG Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are driving these ratings more than others. We argue that such discrepancies might mislead firms about their actual ESG status, potentially leading to cherry-picking areas for improvement, thus raising questions about the accuracy and effectiveness of ESG evaluations in both explaining sustainability and driving capital toward sustainable companies.
We delve into the EU's regulatory changes aimed at boosting transparency in sustainable investments. By examining disparities among ESG rating agencies, we assess how these differences challenge standardization and consensus. Our analysis underscores the critical need for clearer ESG assessments to guide the sustainable investment landscape.
We document the individual willingness to act against climate change and study the role of social norms in a large sample of US adults. Individual beliefs about social norms positively predict pro-climate donations, comparable in strength to universal moral values and economic preferences such as patience and reciprocity. However, we document systematic misperceptions of social norms. Respondents vastly underestimate the prevalence of climate-friendly behaviors and norms. Correcting these misperceptions in an experiment causally raises individual willingness to act against climate change as well as individual support for climate policies. The effects are strongest for individuals who are skeptical about the existence and threat of global warming.
Looking beyond ESG preferences: The role of sustainable finance literacy in sustainable investing
(2024)
We assess how sustainable finance literacy affects people’s sustainable investment behavior, using a pre-registered experiment. We find that an increase in sustainable finance literacy leads to a 4 to 5% increase in the probability of investing sustainably. This effect is moderated by sustainability preferences. In the absence of moderate sustainability preferences, any additional increase in sustainable finance literacy is at minimum irrelevant, and we find some evidence that it might even reduce sustainable investments. Our findings underscore the role of knowledge in shaping sustainable investment decisions, highlighting the importance of factors beyond sustainability preferences.