How does a city suffering from dereliction and decay transform into a flourishing metropolis within a mere century? A new paper by Alyssa Rusonik, PhD student at the Finance department of HEC Paris, investigates one of the greatest economic mysteries of the Renaissance. Although only in the second year of her PhD, Alyssa has received an award for the best article from a doctoral student at the annual conference of the Canadian Network for Economic History. She explains her investigations in this interview for Knowledge@HEC.
Artificial Intelligence has a potentially disruptive impact on organizations, firms, and society at large. The latest mind-boggling illustration came with the discovery of chatGPT’s mesmerizing results in November 2022. This followed a fall of investments in AI last year in Silicon Valley. From analyzing data in one’s business to increasing customer engagement and replacing humans in routine tasks across industries, AI is becoming more relevant to our lives and economy every day. Everyone talks about it, but do we really understand its opportunities and threats? And how can we make the best out of it, whilst ensuring that ethical requirements are met?
HEC Paris Associate Professor Guillaume Vuillemey explores the ways the maritime shipping industry has evolved in the past 40 years to systematically evade its corporate responsibilities. In his groundbreaking research he reveals how this industry – which handles over 80% of global trade flows – uses flags of convenience and limited liability to flout international and moral law. This has repercussions on the environment and basic human rights. In a 30 minutes interview, Vuillemey outlines his approach of this industry and its links to what some are calling the “dark side of globalization”. Extracts.
Gender diversity in corporate boards of directors has long been on the agenda, but whether and when investors reward companies that make efforts towards such inclusion remains an open question. Researchers in Accounting Crystal Shi (HEC Paris), April Klein and Mary Brooke Billings (New York University) investigate whether the #MeToo movement had an impact on investors' perceptions of the benefits of having a diverse and inclusive corporate culture, as reflected by the gender makeup of corporate boards.
By Crystal (yanting) Shi
More than a decade ago, the euro area went through a sovereign debt crisis, in which governments of Southern Europe faced high borrowing costs compared with countries in the north of the euro area. Ultimately, such high borrowing costs led Greece to default on its sovereign debt. In this article, Eric Mengus, Associate Professor of Economics at HEC Paris, explains the euro area sovereign debt crisis and the lessons to take from it, based on his new research, “Asset Purchase Bailouts and Endogenous Implicit Guarantees”, forthcoming in the Journal of International Economics.
By Eric Mengus
“Is crypto about to go extinct?” The question posed by numerous media in January followed a number of major crypto companies collapsing in 2022. Global media concerns came to a climax in November with the FTX imploding and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried placed under arrest. To better gauge the stakes behind this crypto-crisis, HEC Paris Professor Bruno Biais held a Masterclass on January 19. It retraced the Bitcoin’s history, from its inception by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 to current calls for regulation. Here are five of the key takeaways.
Top-quality research and teaching are essential to understand growing inequalities which hinder the urgently needed ecological transition, to interrogate the ESG factors, and to leverage theory and the most ambitious empirical methods. To do so, HEC scholars work with public and private regulators, peers from leading European academic institutions, CEOs and administrators to develop, test, and evaluate novel strategies, policies and practices designed to tackle inequalities in their field. In this Knowledge@HEC issue, we share academic knowledge and highlight professional experiences on those topics. Find the pdf of that issue here.
Because of Europe’s strong social welfare tradition, the social dimension of business has an additional legitimacy and urgency here. Top-quality research and teaching have an essential role to play in understanding growing inequalities which hinder the urgently needed ecological transition, in interrogating the environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, their interplay and their promise and limitations, in leveraging theory and the most ambitious empirical methods. As a leading business school and research center in France and Europe, HEC Paris’ faculty has a responsibility in providing science-based evidence and practical tools to reinvent the business of tomorrow.
Is globalization’s time up? There are two major, and conflicting, views about this tricky topic. For many economists, free trade is a natural state of the global economic system. Any upheavals – Covid-19, the war between Ukraine and Russia, the resurgence of protectionism - can only result in temporary disruptions which, sooner or later, will be corrected. They are just bursts of irrationality, arising momentarily from political forces upsetting otherwise harmonious economic balance, etc.
The Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance of companies has become an increasingly significant factor influencing investor sentiment in recent years. But does this hold for all investors? A recent study by HEC Paris Finance researchers Maxime Bonelli and François Derrien, with Marie Brière of Amundi Asset Management, Paris Dauphine University and Université Libre de Bruxelles, investigated the response of French employee shareholders to ESG performance through their personal investment behavior in their employers’ share schemes. The results show that these employees have a distinctly different response to the ESG performance of their employers: one that is focused on their personal welfare.
By Maxime Bonelli , François Derrien
