Business & Economics
How to get out of the debt trap? Navigating the global financial turmoil
Global economies faced a precarious cycle of recovery pre-pandemic, marked by currency imbalances and interest rate cuts, resulting in a staggering 300 trillion USD global debt burden. Urgent reform of the international monetary system is necessary to address escalating geopolitical crises and economic vulnerabilities, requiring coordinated efforts and a shift towards inclusive and resilient frameworks. Renowned French experts Jean-François Serval, […]
How do power imbalances influence national corruption and welfare?
Professor Wolfgang Scholl of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, has built a detailed model that shows how and where corruption thrives and the damage it causes to social welfare. The social-psychological, cultural, and economic causes and effects are disentangled, and the ethical imperatives are discussed that support a positive outcome. The model confirms empirically that unequal power relations induce corruption […]
A capital question: How did Marx identify accumulation of capital?
‘Accumulation of capital’ is a ubiquitous concept in political economy and central to Marxist theory. Classical economists before Marx defined the concept as gathering ever-greater means of production – ie tools, machinery, buildings, and raw materials. Marxist theorists commonly accept a classical understanding and fail to exploit the essence of Marx’s own concept. Paul Zarembka, Research Professor of Economics at […]
Capitalist utopias and financial futures of the US oil and gas industry
Drawing on long-term fieldwork involving almost a decade of interviews and observations, Dr Mette High, Director of the University of St Andrews’ Centre for Energy Ethics, UK, investigates what happens when oil industry entrepreneurs with utopic projects and private equity firms looking to invest come together. In this study centring on Weld County, Colorado – with more than 22,000 active […]
Stock market valuation: Don’t hate the player, hate the game!
There is great importance in understanding how the overvaluation of a corporate company impacts the market. Shushu Liao of Kühne Logistics University in Germany and her co-author Marco Errico have shown that if investors were to have access to equal and accurate financial information for their investments, overvaluation wouldn’t be at the mercy of corporate managers. Consequently, overvalued financial reports […]
Which factors are relevant for asset prices?
Much research effort has focused on developing estimation methodologies and models aiming to identify the relevant factors for pricing the cross-section of stock returns, meaning the change in average returns across different stocks. Traditional asset pricing models with many factors can no longer cope with the dimensionality of present-day problems. Moreover, relying on misleading results could end in disastrous financial […]
Sustainability asymmetries in buyer–supplier relationships
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This is easy to say, but the reality is more complex. New research into sustainability and Strategic Supply Chain Management (SSCM) shows that buyer–supplier relationships are far from straightforward, and differences between buyers’ and suppliers’ approaches to sustainability can both positively and negatively affect buyers’ financial and market performance. Led […]
Labour force projections: Egypt anticipates a resumption of demographic pressures
Egyptian youths born into the ‘echo generation’ of 2006–2014 are not yet of working age, but when they do enter the labour market there will be a vast increase in the supply of workers. Professor Ragui Assaad, of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota in the US, has been estimating the effects of this increase. […]
Taming the oil price
For the foreseeable future, the world will need oil, but its price volatility makes buying and selling it a challenge for producers and the myriad manufacturers who need it. For brokers who sit in the middle of such transactions, finding the optimal price and the number of clients to spread their risk is one of their biggest challenges. Belleh Fontem, […]
Central banks and climate change mitigation: A Money View perspective
Directing financial flows on a path towards low CO2 emissions was a key objective of the Paris Agreement, but as Dr Jakob Vestergaard, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University in Denmark, observes, ‘financial flows are not on that path at all’. In his investigation of the role of central banks in climate change […]