The relevance of sustainability for investors : can socially responsible investments offer investors superior returns or reduced volatility?

According to the classical approach, investment decisions are made on the basis of two key parameters; the expected rate of return and the level of investment risk. Many investors today are, however, also concerned about the nonfinancial dimensions of investments, such as environmental or social impacts. This has given rise to socially responsible investment practices, integrating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into investment decision-making. Naturally, the question arises whether investors face a trade-off between the financial and the non-financial dimensions of investment performance. In fact, the question has been widely debated among empirical literature, but remains unsolved, due to largely contradicting conclusions. This thesis addressed this question by investigating whether socially responsible investments can provide investors with a financial advantage in either the form of reduced volatility or higher return. For this purpose, a combination of both primary and secondary research methods was used. Firstly, existing literature was studied to derive the current state of empirical research on the topic. Secondly, a statistical analysis was conducted, examining the relationship between the ESG scores and respective volatility and return rates of more than 1500 equity funds across a three-year time horizon between 2016 and 2018

Harnessing Health Care Markets for the Public Interest: Insights for U.S. Health Reform From the German and Dutch Multipayer Systems

Outlines how the German and Dutch systems offer universal coverage via competing insurance plans and promote effective and efficient care. Highlights insurance exchanges, multipayer policies and group purchasing, information systems, and public reporting

Global Competitiveness in Pharmaceuticals: A European Perspective

The report examines the competitive position of the European pharmaceutical companies and industries, and compares them with the pharmaceutical companies and industries in other parts of the world, particularly the US. Over the last two decades, the industry has experienced some important structural changes, mainly driven by technological and institutional shocks that have affected all the stages of its value chain. In turn, this has led to changes in firms' organisation and in market structure, within domestic markets, regionally, and globally. The main finding of the report is that the European industry has indeed been losing competitiveness as compared to the USA, although there are large differences and trends across European countries. As a whole, Europe is lagging behind in its ability to generate, organise, and sustain innovation processes that are increasingly expensive and organisationally complex. In fact, one conclusion of the report is that the relative position of the US as a locus of innovation in pharmaceuticals has increased over the past decade compared to Europe. All in all, the report claims that the competitiveness of the European pharmaceutical industry is negatively affected by the persistence of insufficient degrees of competition and institutional integration, still centred on domestic and fragmented health care and research systems. Four sets of variables have been found to be relevant as sources of competitiveness and growth in pharmaceuticals: 1) The size and the structure of the biomedical education and research systems; 2) Some basic institutions governing labor markets for skilled researchers and managers, as well as corporate governance and finance; 3) Intellectual property rights and patent law; 4) The institutional settings in the regulation of health care systems and, moreover, the nature and intensity of competition on the final market. The data analysed in this report come from OECD, Eurostat, the European Patent Office, IMS Health and PHID (PHarmaceutical Industry Database) at the University of Siena

Global Risks 2014, Ninth Edition.

The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments. If global risks are not effectively addressed, their social, economic and political fallouts could be far-reaching, as exemplified by the continuing impacts of the financial crisis of 2007-2008

International Profiles of Health Care Systems, 2011

This publication presents overviews of the health care systems of Australia, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Each overview covers health insurance, public and private financing, health system organization, quality of care, health disparities, efficiency and integration, use of health information technology, use of evidence-based practice, cost containment, and recent reforms and innovations. In addition, summary tables provide data on a number of key health system characteristics and performance indicators, including overall health care spending, hospital spending and utilization, health care access, patient safety, care coordination, chronic care management, disease prevention, capacity for quality improvement, and public views

Global Risks 2012, Seventh Edition

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks 2012 report is based on a survey of 469 experts from industry, government, academia and civil society that examines 50 global risks across five categories. The report emphasizes the singular effect of a particular constellation of global risks rather than focusing on a single existential risk. Three distinct constellations of risks that present a very serious threat to our future prosperity and security emerged from a review of this year's set of risks. Includes a special review of the important lessons learned from the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and the subsequent nuclear crisis at Fukushima, Japan. It focuses on therole of leadership, challenges to effective communication in this information age and resilient business models in response to crises of unforeseen magnitude

Digital health: meeting the ethical and policy challenges

Digital health encompasses a wide range of novel digital technologies related to health and medicine. Such technologies rely on recent advances in the collection and analysis of ever increasing amounts of data from both patients and healthy citizens. Along with new opportunities, however, come new ethical and policy challenges. These range from the need to adapt current evidencebased standards, to issues of privacy, oversight, accountability and public trust as well as national and international data governance and management. This review illustrates key issues and challenges facing the rapidly unfolding digital health paradigm and reflects on the impact of big data in medical research and clinical practice both internationally and in Switzerland. It concludes by emphasising five conditions that will be crucial to fulfil in order to foster innovation and fair benefit sharing in digital health

The datafication of Swiss healthcare and biomedical research: ethical and legal issues and the way forward for health data governance

This Thesis presents the research conducted over the course of three years on some ethical and legal challenges related to the governance of data in the Swiss healthcare and research context. In PART 1, the background to the work conducted during the PhD is presented. Datafication – as a phenomenon – and its epistemological underpinnings are briefly outlined, to then show that they relate to the most current trends how healthcare and biomedical research are evolving. It is illustrated that the datafication of these two domains calls for the extensive collection, exchange and linkage of different data, thus exacerbating the challenges related to the governance of such processes. It is then argued that a great deal of such challenges are of an ethical and legal nature and a short overview them is provided. Effectively tackling such ethical and legal challenges requires adjusting governance at the international level, but it is also underlined that the national level should not be neglected, given the different shapes that the datafication of healthcare and biomedical research takes in single countries. Finally, the specific context of Switzerland is introduced, by first illustrating the most important initiatives that have lead healthcare and biomedical research to being increasingly datafied and by then sketching out the legal and ethical challenges that these have raised in terms of data governance. In PART 2, it is delineated which questions in relation to data governance in Switzerland this PhD investigated and how it went about answering them from a methodological point of view. It is emphasised that there were three main research questions corresponding to three modules to which the original contributions constituting this PhD belong. In Module 1, the ethical issues raised by the collection and use of data through digital health tools were investigated. In Module 2, the focus was on questioning the (un)readiness of Swiss data protection law to keep up with the challenges that datafication of healthcare and biomedical research generates. In Module 3, the challenges in terms of data governance and the evolution of the Swiss health data landscape mentioned during qualitative interviews with national stakeholders were analysed. An overview of the methodological approaches followed in the three modules is also sketched out. PART 3 contains the original manuscripts that have been written as part of the research conducted in the PhD, divided in the three modules outlined before. In PART 4, there is an overall discussion of the research conducted in the different modules of this Thesis. With respect to the use of data collected via novel digital health tools, a range of ethical issues that are relevant both in general (e.g. the risk of stigmatisation) and more specifically to Switzerland (e.g. the personalisation of health insurance premiums via data) are extensively examined. With reference to the (un)readiness of Swiss data protection law zo face the challenges of datafication in healthcare and research, it is demonstrated that Swiss law still sticks to the outdated ‘consent or anonymise’ approach, which in turns contributes to creating a divide between the law-in-the-books and the law-in-action – as exemplified by the study case of data linkage. With regard to the views of expert stakeholders on the challenges raised by the datafication of Swiss healthcare and biomedical research, it is explained how a tension persists around the issue of the control of health data in Switzerland and it is reflected on the governance changes necessary for the data landscape to evolve in an ethically acceptable fashion. In PART 5, an overview of the limitations of the research conducted in this PhD is given. PART 6 contains a brief conclusion, and PART 7 includes the appendices to some of the original manuscripts of this Thesis

Global Competitiveness in Pharmaceuticals: A European Perspective

The report examines the competitive position of the European pharmaceutical companies and industries, and compares them with the pharmaceutical companies and industries in other parts of the world, particularly the US. Over the last two decades, the industry has experienced some important structural changes, mainly driven by technological and institutional shocks that have affected all the stages of its value chain. In turn, this has led to changes in firms' organisation and in market structure, within domestic markets, regionally, and globally. The main finding of the report is that the European industry has indeed been losing competitiveness as compared to the USA, although there are large differences and trends across European countries. As a whole, Europe is lagging behind in its ability to generate, organise, and sustain innovation processes that are increasingly expensive and organisationally complex. In fact, one conclusion of the report is that the relative position of the US as a locus of innovation in pharmaceuticals has increased over the past decade compared to Europe. All in all, the report claims that the competitiveness of the European pharmaceutical industry is negatively affected by the persistence of insufficient degrees of competition and institutional integration, still centred on domestic and fragmented health care and research systems. Four sets of variables have been found to be relevant as sources of competitiveness and growth in pharmaceuticals: 1) The size and the structure of the biomedical education and research systems; 2) Some basic institutions governing labor markets for skilled researchers and managers, as well as corporate governance and finance; 3) Intellectual property rights and patent law; 4) The institutional settings in the regulation of health care systems and, moreover, the nature and intensity of competition on the final market. The data analysed in this report come from OECD, Eurostat, the European Patent Office, IMS Health and PHID (PHarmaceutical Industry Database) at the University of Siena.Pharmaceutical Industry, R&D, Innovation, Competitiveness

Review of emergent behaviours of systems comparable to infrastructure systemsand analysis approaches that could be applied to infrastructure systems

This paper makes contributions to the understanding of emergent failure in economic infrastructure by considering case studies and approaches from sectors comparable to infrastructure. The review starts by identifying existing ways of thinking about emergent failure and narrows down the scope to system-of-systems’ failures which are unexpected and arise when systems appear to be working normally. In order to target sectors similar to infrastructure, the characteristics of infrastructure sectors were characterised