Essay in Economics, Political Economy and Climate Transition

In this study, we investigate the impact of climate-related events on listed companies and their stock performance. Our focus is on the major historical greenhouse gas emitters of four different sectors (fossil fuel, transportation, automobile, and financial). We analyze the effect of climate-related events, such as natural disasters caused by human actions, climate global strikes and speeches by Greta Thunberg, on the daily abnormal returns of these companies. The results suggest that, firstly, climate-related events can result, on average, in cumulative abnormal negative returns for those companies in these sectors compared to the renewable energy sector, used as the benchmark for the green sector. Second, for some of these companies, reputation risk may be reduced by high environmental pillar scores that are not perfectly aligned with environmental performances (i.e. GHG emissions). We then assess the impact of climate sentiment on short-term stock market performance, as measured by abnormal returns, finding a positive correlation between the climate-related social media talks and cumulative abnormal returns. To conclude, external events, including climate-related rallies and speeches, are correlated with negative abnormal stock returns in line with investor expectations.In this paper we analyse how health system endowment and the quality of institutions impact perceptions towards taxation. We conduct a sentiment analysis of Twitter users’ tweets to determine whether the impact of the Covid-19 health emergency has modified the attitudes of the citizens towards taxation in the four largest European countries: France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We use a difference-in-differences estimation strategy, comparing the average sentiments of individual tweets regarding taxation in different European NUTS-2 regions, before and after the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our results highlight that in regions characterised by higher health system endowment people adopted more positive attitudes towards taxation with respect to those living in regions with low levels of health system endowment over the period -. In addition, we show how higher quality institutions led to more positive perceptions in relative and absolute terms, suggesting a greater predisposition for a more progressive tax system.Lobbying can help policy makers access relevant sector-specific information and make in- formed decisions. However, lobbying can also harm economic welfare if it successfully persuades policy makers to impose unnecessary regulations or maintain excessive market barriers. This study examines the relationship between lobbying expenditures, the environmental policy stringency regulation, firm-level green innovation and environmental reputation. Using a sample of 590 firms from 43 countries across 98 industries, we analyze firm-level financial and environmental data from the period of 2012 to 2020. Our results show that highly green innovative firms tend to spend more on lobbying, and that lobbying expenditures are negatively associated with environmental performance. We also find that environmental policy stringency has a positive impact on corporate environmental performance, while innovation and other factors have mixed effects. Our study contributes to the growing literature on the intersection of political economy, innovation, and climate transition

The Economic Case for Rewards Over Imprisonment

There seems to be a growing social consensus that the United States imprisons far too many people for far too long. But reform efforts have slowed in the face of a challenging question: How can we reduce reliance on prisons while still discouraging crime, particularly violent crime? Through the 1970s, social scientists believed the answer was an array of what I will call preventive benefits: drug and mental health treatment, housing, and even unconditional cash payments. But early evaluations of these programs failed to find much evidence that they were successful, confirming a then-developing economic theory that predicted the programs would fail. This Article calls for a return to prevention. It first surveys evidence showing that a large fraction of prison spending has no incremental effect on crime reduction. And it offers the first detailed summary of the modern evidence on prevention. Preventive benefits have now been proven effective in a variety of settings. Along the way, I argue that a famous federal study of cash benefits was fundamentally misinterpreted as failure by its own authors. Next, I lay out the theoretical economic case for preventive benefits. Standard theory rejects benefits because they are said to cost too much and to potentially encourage some individuals to engage in risky behavior in order to be paid to stop. I suggest both these arguments rely on evidentiary claims that have now been found to be largely false. In addition, I collect and synthesize a series of theoretical reasons why benefits would outperform imprisonment. Among others, benefits enrich crime-stricken communities instead of further impoverishing them, as prison does. This simple fact has several important theoretical dimensions. I also show the ways in which the potential to deliver rewards ex ante, or before a crime has been committed, help to overcome a basic failing of prison: they do not require that humans be highly attentive to future consequences