All spending is not equal: How the EU can increase public support for the EU

People who live in regions that receive high levels of EU funding might be expected to have more positive attitudes toward the EU. However, as Adam William Chalmers and Lisa Maria Dellmuth demonstrate, this relationship is not as simple as it might appear. Drawing on a recent study, they illustrate that a region’s needs make a large difference to the effectiveness of EU funding in building public support: where funding meets a clearly defined need for the local population it has a far more positive effect

The effect of EU spending on support for the integration process depends on how ‘European’ citizens feel

It is often assumed that citizens in states receiving large levels of EU spending are more likely to be supportive of their country’s EU membership. Based on a recent study, Adam William Chalmers and Lisa Maria Dellmuth write that while this principle makes intuitive sense, the reality is more complex. They find that the extent to which citizens already hold a European identity and the level of their political awareness both have a key impact on how fiscal transfers affect support for the EU

Choosing lobbying sides : the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union

Despite the impressive amount of empirical research on lobbying, a fundamental question remains overlooked. How do interest groups choose to lobby different sides of an issue? We argue that how groups choose sides is a function of firm-level economic activity. By studying a highly salient regulatory issue, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and using a novel dataset of lobbying, we reveal that a group’s main economic sector matters most. Firms operating in finance and retail face unique costs and are incentivized to lobby against the GDPR. However, these groups are outgunned by a large, heterogeneous group of firms with superior lobbying firepower on the other side of the issue

Post-woke:Corporate America has reduced woke communications since 2020

Many corporations have been keen to identify with "woke" culture. The term "woke capitalism" was even coined to describe the way that companies align themselves with social justice movements and activist causes.Beyond boardrooms, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron de Santis, the ‘anti-woke’ Republican candidates, soared in popularity in 2023. But, they have both now bowed out of the presidential race.The woke culture war has also been in the spotlight in the antisemitism on campus testimonies, and their aftermath, last fall. Claudine Gay, who for many came to symbolize woke efforts, resigned from her role as president of Harvard at the start of 2024.The contrasting trajectories beg the question: have we already seen peak woke? Is woke on the ascent, or at least, impervious to a backlash? Or, is corporate wokeness on the decline, or even, facing a death knell?Since 2020, woke language has featured less in US-headquartered firms’ CSR communications. As South Park called it, companies now fear the risk of being "[woke Disney]."No longer poised to comment on every social issue, American enterprises could be reverting to an interpretation of wokeism centred on the responsibility of executives to address and mitigate the unintended consequences of their actions —- rather than to take positions on wider societal debates. They may be making a concerted effort to speak less, but more authentically.Such a change would be welcome beyond corporate America. The gap between moral grandstanding and business-as-usual [made headlines] that prompted eye-rolls around the world just days before COP28 in Dubai. Documents revealed that the UAE government planned to use the moral high ground of hosting the climate change conference to strike oil deals.The decline of Corporate America's wokeism since 2020--we hope--may mean less disingenuous posturing and more doing

Transnational experience and high-performing entrepreneurs in emerging economies: evidence from Vietnam

Do high-performing entrepreneurs in the technology sector in emerging economies have more, or different, transnational experience than the founders of high-performing non-technology businesses? Employing Vietnam as a case study, we find that they do; the founders of high-performing technology-oriented businesses are 15 times more likely to have transnational experience in the U.S. compared to their non-technology peers, and are 35 times more likely to be graduates of American universities compared to founders of high-performing, non-technology-oriented business. The founders of high-performing non-technology businesses are more ‘place-based’, as they have predominantly lived and studied in Vietnam. Our data and methods are comprised of a logistic regression analysis of the biographical details of Vietnam's 143 highest-performing entrepreneurs; the founders of the 76 Vietnam's (non-technology-based) companies with the highest market capitalizations and the 67 founders of Vietnam's highest performing technology-oriented companies, in terms of private equity fundraising, as of April 2020. The paper's theoretical contribution is the advance it makes in analytical explanations of why technology-based entrepreneurs have more transnational experience, especially in the U.S., than high-performing founders of businesses in other sectors; this helps extend theory on the relationship between social and human capital and entrepreneurial performance, specifically in the technology sector