Podcasts

Top personalities from the political and academic worlds, including Pascal Lamy, Peter Altmaier, John Denton and Merit Janow, were amongst the 17 speakers at a September 29 conference at HEC Paris on constitutionalism. Over three intense sessions, the policymakers and professors of law explored reforms in governance of public goods. In this article, however, our focus was on how innovative research in faculties should and sometimes does lead to concrete policy proposals.

The COP27 summit begins on November 6 in Sharm al Sheikh, Egypt, exactly a year after COP26 in Glasgow. A year is a long time and challenges have piled up: a world divided by war in Europe, where the world sees an acceleration of climate changes and global warming has beaten all modern records. In this light, Knowledge@HEC discusses the 12-day summit’s agenda and objectives with two guests: Igor Shishlov, Academic Co-Director for HEC’s Climate & Business Certificate; and Shiraz Moret-Bailly, co-president of Esp’R, an HEC student association devoted to sustainability and social economy.

Bertrand Quélin is professor of Strategy and the holder of the Bouygues-HEC Paris Chair in ‘Smart City and the Common Good’. He has been spearheading research on ways public bodies and private companies partner up to create both social and economic value. We discuss how the partnerships rely on a form of hybridization relying on three mechanisms: contractual, institutional and the ability to regularly partner up with public authorities.

As Europe faces postwar records in forced migration from the east and south, ad hoc citizen groups have been sprouting up to ease the hardships of their new homelands. To illustrate this, HEC Assistant Professor David Crevlin publishes a detailed study on the rapid and effective response of German citizens to the unprecedented wave of migrants in 2015. A lesson of integration for all Europe?

How can private companies and public bodies reorganize their short- and long-term strategies in the current economic context? For years, Professor Bertrand Quélin has been researching the collaboration between private firms, public authorities and civil society to offer solutions aimed at building resilience in cities and designed to tackle the challenges of climate change.

The methods and aims of activist short sellers and financial analysts are often at odds. In a highly competitive environment, there is a battle for narrative authority, with short sellers often criticizing analysts. New research examines this struggle, and how — or if — analysts respond to challenges.

In the United Kingdom, more than 700 Post Office workers were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting between 2000 and 2014. That was the result of a fault in Horizon, a Fujitsu computer system used by the UK Post Office. How can AI solutions be developed to detect and prevent such intelligent anomalies? To answer these questions and more we have turned to HEC Professor of Accounting and Management Control, Aluna Wang. She is also chairholder at Hi! PARIS Center on Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.

Professor of Finance and Executive Director of the Société Générale Energy & Finance Chair at HEC Paris, Jean-Michel Gauthier spoke to us on March 3, one week after Russia invaded Ukraine. Jean-Michel is a veteran of the energy business. After a start in the oil and gas industry, he moved to the energy consulting for 16 years as a partner at Deloitte. In parallel, he joined HEC Paris’ finance department in 2006. The school campus is where we discuss the dramatic events developing in Ukraine. Jean-Michel focuses on a key factor behind the conflict: the question of energy. Not just the pipelines that bring Europe 40% of its natural gas and much of its oil – but also the knock-on effects on all energy sources that prop up our global economy. He helps us understand what role energy is playing in this ongoing conflict and where these upheavals could lead the entire planet.

HEC Paris Assistant Professor in Marketing, Klaus Miller, analyzes the February 3 Facebook/Meta stock market plunge. What exactly does it tell us about private data on internet and its links to the advertising world? We meet Klaus on February 8, the very day he and five co-researchers self-published “The Impact of the GDPR on the Online Advertising Market”. This book focuses on Europe’s GDPR and how it affects online publicity. In a wide-ranging discussion on personal data and the advertising industry, Klaus provides insights on ad blockers on news websites and their impact on our reading habits.