This article examines how concentrated corporate power in the technology sector reshapes repression and human rights harm, arguing that an integrated Business and Human Rights (BHR) and Transitional Justice (TJ) approach is needed. It identifies three persistent gaps in BHR practice—regulatory fragmentation, limited access to remedy and Global North dominance—and demonstrates how TJ principles, particularly victim-centred participation, Global South leadership and transformative reparations, can address these challenges. Drawing on Latin American experiences with truth-seeking, reparations and corporate accountability, the article develops a hybrid BHR–TJ framework designed to confront power asymmetries, strengthen remedies and embed guarantees of non-repetition in global governance. The argument positions this integration as a forward-looking response to the structural harms of the digital economy, offering tools to move beyond proceduralism towards systemic corporate accountability. By combining BHR’s regulatory tools with TJ’s participatory and transformative approaches, the article contributes a novel accountability model for the digital era.

The global arms trade stands at the crossroads of security, business and human rights. While historically dominated by security narratives, increasing recognition of the arms industry’s business functions has led to calls for greater corporate accountability for the adverse human rights impacts of arms production and transfers. Business and Human Rights (BHR) provides innovative approaches for addressing regulatory and conceptual gaps in arms trade governance, and, in particular, offers two key paths forward for bringing coherency to arms trade governance and recalibrating the balance between security and business interests and human rights protection. First, as a field of practice, BHR can be utilised to develop comprehensive and coordinated due diligence that bridges silos between human rights, corruption, diversion and lack of transparency, to overcome regulatory fragmentation. Second, as a discourse, BHR introduces a conceptual foundation for reframing the status of human rights in arms trade governance and impelling corporate leadership to elevate human rights protection.

This study examines the relationship between cannabis and wine consumption, investigating whether these substances function as substitutes or complements. Using data from an online survey of 523 German wine consumers, including 215 cannabis users, we analyze consumption across four wine categories: white, red, rosé/sparkling, and sweet wines. To address potential bias from endogeneity, we employ an IV-Ordered Probit model with endogenous covariates—cannabis user/usage. The findings provide evidence of a complementary relationship: cannabis users report significantly higher wine consumption than non-users across most categories, except red wine. The effect is particularly pronounced for rosé/sparkling and sweet wines. More frequent cannabis use also correlates with increased wine consumption. Motivation-specific analyses reveal nuanced dynamics. Using cannabis for relaxation decreases wine consumption, suggesting substitution, while enhancement motives increase rosé/sparkling consumption. Social motives, however, show negative associations with these wines. Overall, results suggest that the nature of the cannabis–wine relationship depends on user motivations.

This study presents three key steps to enable the Business and Human Rights (BHR) research agenda to promote and advance greater applicability to the emerging challenges in the field. Drawing on research conducted on BHR sources (almost exclusively by Brazilian and Spanish-speaking authors), this article aims to demonstrate the need for further BHR scholarship to simultaneously: (i) identify and remedy epistemic biases through reflexive engagement with a victim-centred scholarship from the Global South that recentres BHR research on the perspective of affected communities; (ii) move from consideration to co-production by grounding BHR theory in practice via participatory methodologies and dialogue between communities, researchers and corporations; and (iii) by aligning with steps one and two, recontextualize Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) research into an integrated Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence (HREDD) approach that incorporates environmental and climate dimensions and ensure meaningful, victim-centred engagement with affected communities.

Entrepreneurial reentry after business failure is an important area of research in the field of entrepreneurship. However, previous studies have largely overlooked the crucial role of time factors – both objective and subjective – in the context of failure and subsequent entrepreneurial endeavors. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of firm lifespan on entrepreneurial reentry and the moderating effect of entrepreneurs’ temporal focus. Through manual matching across multiple databases, we obtain a sample of 368 entrepreneurs. The results show that a longer firm lifespan negatively influences entrepreneurial reentry and that a past focus further amplifies this negative relationship. This study contributes to research on the determinants of entrepreneurial reentry and provides theoretical insights into the role of time in entrepreneurial reentry.

External experts play a crucial role in implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, advising businesses on how to identify, prevent and mitigate risks. Yet their responsibility remains underexplored in relation to judicial remedy. This article addresses this gap by investigating the involvement of external experts in strategic litigation concerning alleged corporate human rights harms. While such litigation primarily seeks remediation and societal change, it also reveals overlooked actors within legal processes. Using the concept of ‘visibilisation’, this study examines three landmark cases to explore how courts understand experts’ legal subjectivity. Findings suggest that this subjectivity encompasses both an evidentiary and functional role in corporate processes, raising important questions regarding accountability. By highlighting their influence on the corporate responsibility to respect human rights and human rights due diligence (HRDD), the article advances understanding of expert responsibility and considers its future in the emerging era of mandatory HRDD.

This article explores digital colonialism in Africa, focusing on how Big Tech and local intermediaries perpetuate data exploitation, infrastructure dependency and algorithmic bias. Applying a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens, it draws parallels between historical colonialism and the modern digital economy, highlighting persistent power imbalances in data control and tech sovereignty. Multinational firms from the Global North extract and monetise African data with little benefit to local communities, reinforcing dependency. Local actors (governments, tech elites and influencers) often enable this through policy gaps and cultural alignment with Western platforms. The article examines the impact on data sovereignty, human rights and economic autonomy, including risks of surveillance and silencing local voices. It calls for policy reforms, investment in African tech ecosystems, digital literacy and robust regional regulation. Ultimately, it advocates for digital justice and self-governance to reclaim Africa’s digital future.

This paper builds on a thought experiment by Professor Harry van Buren, asking what might emerge if the Business and Human Rights field took a temporary ‘break’ from the UN Guiding Principles (UNGPs). It critically analyzes how the UNGPs’ pragmatic and consensus-oriented design, while instrumental in institutionalizing the field, has also shifted its normative orientation. The paper argues that the increasing dominance of procedural pragmatism has led to compliance-driven approaches that risk displacing more justice-oriented, participatory visions of accountability. In response, the paper aims to contribute to potential reimagining of the field outside of the confines of the UNGPs by offering an alternative pathway grounded in Critical Dialogic Accounting and Accountability, Worker-driven Social Responsibility, and prefigurative politics. The paper concludes with a reflection that the future of BHR depends not just on expanding the implementation of existing norms but on rethinking what accountability can look like when built from below.

This article examines the evolving landscape of accounting, distinguishing between mainstream practices and critical developments that challenge conventional notions of accounting and accountability. By engaging with perspectives that reimagine accounting’s role, the paper highlights how rights intersect with accounting practices and how accounting, in turn, shapes rights. While financial and non-financial disclosures can expose human rights abuses, concerns persist over ‘accountability-washing’ and the dominance of economic interests. The reluctance of standard-setting bodies, such as the International Sustainability Standards Board, to integrate human rights underscores the political and institutional barriers to change. The article concludes by exploring future research directions through which business and human rights scholars and critical accounting researchers can mutually benefit from each other’s insights.

Strategic litigation has emerged as a prominent tool in the business and human rights (BHR) field, offering a pathway to promote corporate accountability, test innovative legal arguments and push for systemic change. While often framed as private tort actions, such litigation frequently aims to shape broader norms beyond individual remedies. This article explores how strategic litigation contributes to the evolution of corporate responsibility to respect human rights by analysing two case studies: supply chain liability claims in English courts and corporate climate litigation in the Netherlands. Drawing on these examples, the article argues that, despite its limitations, strategic BHR litigation plays an important role in translating soft law standards, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, into enforceable legal duties.

Review systems, including quantitative measures as well as text-based expression of experiences, are omnipresent in today's digital platform economy. This paper studies the existence of reputation inflation, i.e., unjustified increases in ratings, with a special focus of heterogeneity between experienced and non-experienced users. Using data on more than 5 million reviews from an online wine platform we compare consistency between numerical feedback and textual reviews as well as sentiment measures. Overall the wine platform displays strongly increasing numerical feedback over our time period from 2014 to 2020 while the scores predicted by reviewers’ written feedback remain constant. This difference is consistent across both expert and non-expert reviewers. Online platforms as well as potential customers should be aware of the phenomenon of reputation inflation and simplifying feedback to one number might do a disservice to review platforms’ goal of providing a representative quality assessment.

Drawing on unbalanced panel data with a maximum of 271,656 bilateral trade flow observations from 1996 to 2021, this study investigates both the linear and nonlinear influence of national Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance gaps on green exports. When the ESG performance of the exporting country exceeds that of the destination country, the results indicate that an increase in the ESG gap significantly stimulates green exports, and there is evidence that this stimulating effect is achieved by widening green innovation gaps. However, the marginal effect diminishes as environmental regulations in the destination country become more stringent. Conversely, when the exporting country’s ESG performance is lower, narrowing the ESG gap leads to an N-shaped relationship with green exports, which remains U-shaped after removing the extremes. This research provides empirical evidence and policy implications for the trade effects of ESG performance from a macro perspective, while supporting the rationality and necessity of the ESG concept.

We develop a continuous-time model examining agency conflicts among controlling shareholders (managers), minority shareholders, and creditors in corporate investment decisions. The manager’s private benefits encourage overinvestment, while their equity stake and debt overhang lead to underinvestment. We show these offsetting incentive effects can achieve optimal investment timing under certain conditions. Agency costs exhibit U-shaped relationships with private benefits, tax rates, volatility, managerial ownership, and leverage. The model reveals how the interplay among agency conflicts, tax benefits, and bankruptcy costs shapes optimal ownership and capital structure, explaining several documented empirical patterns in corporate finance.

This article proposes a local projection (LP) residual bootstrap method to construct confidence intervals for impulse response coefficients of AR(1) models. Our bootstrap method is based on the LP approach and involves a residual bootstrap procedure applied to AR(1) models. We present theoretical results for our bootstrap method and proposed confidence intervals. First, we prove the uniform consistency of the LP-residual bootstrap over a large class of AR(1) models that allow for a unit root, conditional heteroskedasticity of unknown form, and martingale difference shocks. Then, we prove the asymptotic validity of our confidence intervals over the same class of AR(1) models. Finally, we show that the LP-residual bootstrap provides asymptotic refinements for confidence intervals on a restricted class of AR(1) models relative to those required for the uniform consistency of our bootstrap.

“Cultures of Power” tells the story of the electrification of greater Los Angeles from the first introduction of electric light in 1882 through 1969. Whereas scholars have previously examined how electrification has either preceded urbanization or amended pre-existing urban forms, in Southern California these two processes took place simultaneously, with each indelibly shaping the other. The result was not only a new model of American urbanism, but also a transformative approach to electric system development that shaped that industry’s growth worldwide. Greater Los Angeles and its electric systems, I argue, emerged from a decades-long process of co-creation fueled by differing perceptions of local landscapes, regional political conflict, and an emerging local mass culture fixated on electric symbols and products. I use this decades-long arc to illustrate how electricity’s social prominence shifted in response not merely to the passage of time and the growing familiarity of electric technologies, but rather as a consequence of choices made by Angeleno institutions and individuals.