This study examines whether board networks influence corporate carbon emissions and the strategic pathways through which firms decarbonize. Using a sample of 1952 firms across 48 countries from 2003 to 2020, we employ dynamic stacked regressions that exploit exogenous carbon-regulation shocks affecting firms connected through shared third-party board memberships. We find that focal firms reduce absolute emissions by about 9%. The effect concentrates in high emitting firms operating under strict environmental regulations, with emission targets and policies, and low financial constraints. However, emission intensity does not improve. This pattern suggests that network-driven emission reductions primarily reflect divestment or contraction of carbon-intensive activities, rather than operational decarbonization through technological upgrading. While indirect board ties transmit regulatory responses, overall board centrality does not reduce emissions though it is associated with higher environmental ratings. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom about board networks and highlight their nuanced role in spreading environmental practices.

Competitive pressure is an important driving factor of corporate behavioural changes. Yet, it is still unclear how it influences corporate attitudes towards environmental challenges. In this study, we systematically analyse the sustainability behaviour of a global sample of publicly traded firms to examine if and how competitive pressure pushes them to implement effective behavioural changes to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Our results suggest that competitive pressure induces firms to diversify investments across a broad spectrum of environmental initiatives. Importantly, diversification results from a decreased relative investment in risk mitigation and stakeholder engagement activities counterbalanced by an increased relative investment in innovation capabilities, and it is associated with a positive abatement potential. Effects are modest in size but significant and robust against multiple alternative specifications. Overall, our analysis suggests that competitive pressures can be a driving force of effective corporate mitigation actions that integrate response diversity mechanisms to address environmental challenges.

We investigate the propagation of environmental performance among competitors and in customer–supplier relationships. We find a significant causal effect among competitors, while the propagation from customers to suppliers and vice versa appears insignificant or does not survive identification tests. The effect is stronger among firms in highly concentrated competitor networks and toward firms with less market and bargaining power than their competitors. We also find significantly stronger propagation of environmental performance among competitors engaged in joint research and development activity. These results show that the propagation stems from both competitive pressure and technological spillover. Importantly, we find that propagation is strong when the competitor improves its environmental performance and when the firm’s own environmental performance is poor initially, alleviating concerns that improvements in performance are concentrated among firms, which are already green. Overall, network effects among competing firms are a significant force shaping environmental performance, and a force mostly for good. 

In this paper, we explore the relations among institutional quality, households’ level of trust, and stock market participation. We find that institutional quality has a significant impact on both trust and participation. The individual level of trust significantly affects participation, but trust plays a small role in the effect of institutional quality on participation. Further, we demonstrate that immigrants are affected by the institutional quality of both their country of residence and their home country, and that education emerges as an important learning factor in immigrants’ adaptation to new institutional environments.

We model the spillover effect between competing firms’ daily idiosyncratic stock returns, using spatial econometric techniques. Contagion effect from rival firms dominates competitive effect, and the net effect is larger from negative return shocks of rival firms than from positive ones. The net effect is strong for firms in product markets with low concentration and high product market fluidity. 

This paper investigates the effects of learning channels on stock market participation. More specifically, we investigate the direct effects of learning about financial matters from one's private network, financial advisors, and the media, as well as the moderating effects of financial literacy on the relationship between learning from these channels and stock market participation. Analyzing a unique cross-section data that combine survey data and bank register data on individual retail investors, we find that media is the only learning channel that increases the likelihood of owning stocks and the portfolio share invested in stocks. We also find that financial literacy has a significant moderating effect: Interactions point to the joint importance of learning from media and financial literacy for individuals' stock market participation. Our findings suggest implications to policymakers when designing financial education programs.

We analyze the importance of different asset holdings for the interdependence of the yield curves in the Euro area using a spatial VAR model. We find that the cross-border holdings of long-term debt and bank lending are important for the interdependence. We also find that comovement in the Euro area declines after 2008. We show that this decline is not related to the difference among countries in reacting to shocks from the US during the financial crisis. Rather, it largely reflects the segmentation between GIIPS and non-GIIPS countries. Our analysis of dispersion in sovereign-CDS-spread term structure shows that the differential in sovereign creditworthiness in the Euro area is a main driver of the yield-curve divergence after 2008.