Ratings and rankings have become powerful tools in global governance, frequently used to motivate companies to be good corporate citizens. A wide range of environmental and social matters such as access to medicine, climate change, obesity and working conditions increasingly transcend national borders and escape the reach of national regulators. For such issues, who should set the rules about the responsibilities of corporations? How can corporations that are by definition designed to generate profit, be guided towards making decisions that benefit society as a whole? Afshin Mehrpouya and Rita Samiolo explore the process behind the production of these rankings.
By Afshin Mehrpouya
To date, at least nine international banks have paid enormous sums to the US as a result of violating US economic sanctions, including the French bank BNP Paribas, which was fined nearly $9 billion in 2014. As the US increasingly employs its punitive arsenal to force non-US banks to comply, this has resulted in their Americanization, argue two HEC professors.
By David Restrepo Amariles , Matteo M Winkler
The four giants collectively known as GAFA yield such power that it's easy for them to strike unfair deals with business partners and consumers. But a French commercial court has created a game-changing precedent by holding accountable a US-based online booking platform using the concept of significant imbalance. This has shaped a whole new doctrine which potentially brings more balance to transactions with GAFA. Explanation by David Restrepo Amariles, HEC Professor of Law.
By David Restrepo Amariles
The relationship between cannabis and society is a long and deeply contested one. Throughout history, cannabis has been associated with everything from health, leisure, and pop culture to criminal and immoral behavior. But beyond the simple debate about whether cannabis is good or bad, the study of cannabis markets needs interdisciplinarity, to know what is required to construct an effective and fair contested market.
By Dane Pflueger , Daniel Martinez Ahloy
During this historical moment of transition to a more sustainable world, HEC Paris has a responsibility to help business stakeholders transform the challenges around this transition into opportunities – opportunities to maximize both economic and social value, notably by being more innovative and impactful. It is time to revisit existing organizational theories and rethink the way we teach business in terms of social utility. Find the newsletter of this Knowledge@HEC Journal here.
In everyday technologies, learning algorithms are becoming ubiquitous. They are even changing the way laws and regulations are produced and enforced, with law increasingly determined by data and enforced automatically. In his study, David Restrepo Amariles investigates how learning algorithms are developing SMART Law to improve the quality of regulations and their enforcement, and how this can be achieved without infringing on our civil liberties and the rule of law.
Can standards and other regulatory devices established by corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices be likened to legal rules and standards? Yes, according to David Restrepo Amariles and Arnaud Van Waeyenberge, who have demonstrated that CSR increasingly operates as a genuine normative system and can even stand in for the law. This is an important development in a time when, as illustrated by the 2017 list of the 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World, corporations, especially in France, are increasingly proactive when it comes to CSR practices.
By David Restrepo Amariles , Arnaud Van Waeyenberge
The jurisdiction of US economic sanctions is far greater than many businesses realise. French banking corporation BNP Paribas recently agreed to pay the US government the astronomic amount of 8.9 billion dollars, for doing business in sanctioned countries such as Sudan, Iran and Cuba. In their study, David Restrepo Amariles and Matteo Winkler investigate what this means for the future of European corporate structure.
The trade deal currently being negotiated between the US and the EU is one of the most ambitious ever conceived, with a chapter dedicated to promote the convergence of the respective policies across the Atlantic. While this has triggered fears of a “race to the bottom”, i.e. to lower health and safety standards, a new paper argues that the treaty could actually be a chance to “level up” instead of down.
By Alberto Alemanno
The legal field has experienced rapid increases in the use of indicators, which give quantitative measures of aspects such as the extent of the rule of law. A new paper takes a closer look at why and how these legal metrics have emerged and what it means for governance.
