Profiting From Our Pain: Privileged Access to Social Impact Investing

Social impacting investing has become the latest trend to permeate the financial markets. With massive anticipated funding gaps for sustainable development goals, and a millennial-driven thirst for doing good while doing well, this trend is likely to continue in the coming decades. This burgeoning industry is poised to experience yet an additional boost, since it provides an alternative mechanism for private actors to “profit from our pain,” particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. As to be expected, the law has not sufficiently adapted to this new wave of innovation. Scholars have thus focused on how social impact investing should be measured and disclosed. However, they have paid limited attention to whether federal securities laws’ antiquated distinctions between public and private indicators—or rather its public-private divide—contributes to the harms that poorly overseen social impact investments can cause. This Article seeks to fill this scholarly gap by exploring how this public-private divide gives rise to the possibility that social impact investing will lead to exploitation. This divide permits regulatory loopholes where social impact investors can obscure information about potential negative externalities flowing from their investments. It further allows elite investors to exclusively profit from community pain

Conceptions of Crisis Management: The Analysis of Pharmaceutical Companies in Germany, Japan, and the United States

Many people today question whether global pharmaceutical companies operate with a universal set standard for crisis management or if cultural values influence their decisions regardless of external pressures. Because of technology, continental borders no longer obstruct intercultural communication. The result of increasing scientific advances leaves no organization impervious to both true problems and false rumors spread by the media. An issue can instantaneously erupt and leak into the public domain before a corporation can confer and manage the issue internally. Therefore, crisis management is essential for both large and small corporations to help them alleviate any potential image damage. Pharmaceutical companies are especially prone to crises because they operate in the healthcare sector. In consideration of this, it is vital for pharmaceutical organizations, no matter where they are located geographically, to prepare for such crisis events. The different methods international pharmaceutical firms used to manage crises are examined in the context of their headquarters\u27 country of origin. The hypothesis suggests that although a universal set of crisis management guidelines is developing, businesses still should be sensitive to differing cultural values

The Interpretive and Relational Work of Financial Innovation: a Resemblance of Assurance in Islamic Finance

What social forces shape the trajectory of novel, moralized forms of finance such as social finance, green finance, or Islamic banking and finance? More broadly, how do agents mobilize arguments and organize each other to create any form of financial innovation? This article addresses both questions by contributing an ethnography of a novel financial innovation pseudonymously named Sukuk Illumination, an internationally traded moral alternative to a corporate bond. This article’s findings both elaborate and subsume existing functionalist and critical explanations of financial innovation. The central argument is that we can better understand what causes financial innovation and the trajectory that new innovations take when we conceptualize each financial instrument as a polysemic cultural object materialized in legal contracts and institutionalized work practices and created by parties with asymmetric power to define the new object. Financial innovation necessarily involves multiple parties in a financial service commodity chain with multivalent motivations co-producing and hotly debating interpretations of the prospective financial instrument while simultaneously creating, refashioning, and differentiating existing relationships with one another. Sukuk Illumination demonstrates both the potential and constraints for creating new moralized financial instruments and for transforming financial systems

Mexico\u27s Quest in the North American Markets

Since the 1980s Mexico has implemented various economic policies that have improved its financial system at times. All the policies have ultimately failed. Since the 1990s both Mexico and China have made progress in foreign trade with their respective trade organizations. Mexico entered the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. In spite of being a part of two different trade organizations, both countries had a significant increase on their GDP and consequently a change of focus and direction towards their internal investments to enhance their production of exports. Unfortunately, these two counties have recently experienced frequent overlapping of their exports; which has increased the competition between the two countries. This thesis examines the possibilities and procedures that Mexico, along with its NAFTA partners, must follow in order to evade the economic harm generated by the rise of the Chinese economy

Better Growth, Helping the Paris COP-out? Fallacies and Omissions of the New Climate Economy Report

Series: SRE - Discussion Paper

Resources, Capabilities, and Routines in Public Organization

States, state agencies, multilateral agencies, and other non-market actors are relatively under-studied in the strategic entrepreneurship literature. While important contributions examining public decision makers have been made within the agency-theoretic and transaction-cost traditions, there is little research that builds on resource-based, dynamic capabilities, and behavioral approaches to organizations. Yet public organizations can be usefully characterized as stocks of physical, organizational, and human resources; they interact with other organizations in pursuing a type of competitive advantage; they can possess excess capacity, and may grow and diversify in part according to Penrosean (dynamic) capabilities and behavioral logic. Public organizations may be managed as stewards of resources, capabilities, and routines. This paper shows how resource-based, (dynamic) capabilities, and behavioral approaches shed light on the nature and governance of public organizations and suggests a research agenda for public entrepreneurship that reflects insights gained from applying strategic management theory to public organization.

Authoritarian Neoliberalism:Periodization and Critique

Neoliberalism is variegated as different types of neoliberalism co-exist in a world market that is organized in the shadow of a neoliberalization process that began with neoliberal regime shifts in the USA and UK. This article provides a periodization of neoliberal regime shifts within this context, starting with their pre-history up to the point of no return and then tracing their roll-back, roll forward, blowback, ‘Third Way’, moments of financial crisis, and crisis of crisis-management phases. It argues that neoliberal regime shits were associated from their pre-history onwards with intertwined authoritarian populist and authoritarian statist discourses and practices. Nonetheless, the intensification and interaction of crisis-tendencies of different kinds in different phases and changing forms of resistance have led to an increasingly authoritarian statist form of neoliberal regime, characterized by a state of permanent austerity that requires increased surveillance and policing to maintain it. This illustrates Nicos Poulantzas’s suggestion in the 1970s that authoritarian statism is becoming the normal form of the capitalist type of state but rests on the intensification of features normally associated with exceptional regimes. This article updates Poulantzas’s argument to an era of finance-dominated accumulation and provides a new characterization of authoritarian neoliberal statism

The market for socially responsible investing : a review of the developments

This contribution explains how socially responsible investing (SRI) has evolved in the last few decades and sheds light on its latest developments. It describes different forms of SRI in the financial markets; and deliberates on the rationale for the utilization of positive and negative screenings of listed businesses and public organizations. A comprehensive literature review suggests that the providers of financial capital are increasingly allocating funds toward positive impact and sustainable investments. Therefore, this descriptive paper provides a factual summary of the proliferation of SRI products in financial markets. Afterwards it presents the opportunities and challenges facing the stakeholders of SRI. This research presents a historic overview on the growth of SRI products in the financial services industry. It clarifies that the market for responsible investing has recently led to an increase in a number of stakeholders, including; contractors, non governmental organizations (NGOs) and research firms who are involved in the scrutinization of the businesses’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) behaviors. This discursive contribution raises awareness on the screenings of positive impact and sustainable investments. The researcher contends that today’s socially responsible investors are increasingly analyzing the businesses’ non-financial performance, including their ESG credentials. In conclusion this paper puts forward future research avenues in this promising field of study.peer-reviewe

The Rising Threat of Food Security; A Keynesian Solution to a Global Problem

Is food security a threat to Global security? Recent history suggests so. After all, since 1947 the international community has struggled to implement agreements on agriculture in the name of preserving peace. Most recently, in the last of the Doha Development Round negotiations, efforts have been made to enhance food security (with measures such as equal access to resources, trade liberation, and the removal of tariffs for developing countries). In my thesis I will explore both the theory of these policies and their efficacy in practice. More specifically, I will examine the limitations of past policies (such as anti-dumping ) aimed at promoting food security in the world, and propose more effective alternatives. My case study focuses on the practice of “dumping” in Haiti – namely, the underselling of cheap food grains by developed nations to gain market shares and trade advantages. This phenomenon has caused great harm to the Haitian economy, damaging their food production, increasing their food dependency on exports, and making them vulnerable for price spikes – all of which has, in turn, lead to social unrest and riots. In the case of Haiti, dumping has also been the result of an international shift towards liberalization without limits: the promotion of free and open trade through the removal of all barriers. This is, perhaps, one reason why international efforts to curb practices such as dumping (which compromise food security) have been unsuccessful: they fail to impose and enforce the limits needed to preserve a more level playing field and balance of trade. With this in mind, I will examine current agricultural and trade policy with an eye towards reform, returning to the theories of John Maynard Keynes to illustrate that truly “free” trade requires limits and international enforcement, and that such limits can, theoretically and in practice, benefit the entire world – rather than, simply, increase the divisions separating rich and poor, haves and have nots, developed and developing nations. And this sort of understanding is, ultimately, a necessary foundation upon which to address a problem – food security – that is growing and threatening to pose an increasingly serious threat to world security