This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the frequency and severity of accidents involving electric vehicles (EVs) in comparison to internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). It draws on extensive data from Norway from 2020 to 2023, a period characterised by significant EV adoption. We examine over two million registered EVs that collectively account for 28 billion kilometres of travel. In total we have analysed 139 billion kilometres of travel and close to 14,0000 accidents across all fuel types. We supplement this data with data from the Highway Loss Data Institute in the US and Association of British Insurers data in the UK as well as information from the Guy Carpenter large loss motor database.

A thorough analysis comparing accident frequency and severity of EVs with ICEVs in the literature to date has yet to be conducted, which this paper aims to address. This research will assist actuaries and analysts across various domains, including pricing, reserving and reinsurance considerations.

Our findings reveal a notable reduction in the frequency of accidents across all fuel types over time. Specifically, EVs demonstrate a lower accident frequency compared to ICEVs, a trend that may be attributed more to advancements in technology rather than the inherent characteristics of the fuel type, even when adjusted for COVID. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that EVs experience fewer accidents involving single units relative to non-EV and suggests a decrease in driver error and superior performance on regular road types.

Reduction in EV accident frequency of 17% and a change in the distribution of average severity with higher damage costs and lower injury costs leading to an overall reduction of 11%

However, it is important to note that when accidents do occur, the number of units involved as a proxy for severity involving EVs is marginally higher than those involving ICEVs. The average claim cost profile for EVs changes significantly with property damage claims being more expensive and bodily injury claims being less expensive for EVs.

Overall, our research concludes that EVs present a lower risk profile compared to their ICEV counterparts, highlighting the evolving landscape of vehicle safety in the context of increasing EV utilisation.

It is widely recognized that the hostile takeover is a key element of the UK’s shareholder value system of corporate governance. This article draws on archival evidence to offer a detailed account of the emergence of the hostile takeover and its acceptance within the media and government between 1952 and 1954. The existing literature claims that the takeover was not normalized until 1959, and that finance was restricted until then. This article shows that takeovers were accepted within government five years earlier, and that the Bank of England and Treasury knew that insurance companies were financing them, but did nothing about it.

The article begins with the legal and accounting changes introduced in Companies Act 1948, as well as the precarious financial position of shareholders. Together, they created an opening for hostile takeovers to emerge, which were driven by the desire of bidders to gain control of, and sell off, real property that was undervalued on corporate balance sheets. First emerging in 1952, the hostile takeover took the corporate and financial community, as well as the Government (the Bank of England, Board of Trade and Treasury) by surprise. The media led the way in cheerleading for the hostile takeover, while companies such as the Savoy Hotel Group and the Daily Mirror sought to defend themselves against unwelcome approaches. The Government ultimately settled for condemning “speculative” bids in public, but behind the scenes accepted the hostile takeover as legitimate. By 1954, it was recognized that: companies were under pressure to raise dividends and sell off assets in order to deter takeover bidders; that they only had limited options to defend themselves; and that there was little that could be done by Government. Managerialism had begun to give way to shareholder value.

Why do some countries cooperate in international negotiations while others do not? This paper examines how regime type and trade relationships jointly shape cooperation among states. While prior research claims that democracies are inherently more cooperative and that trade fosters collaboration, we argue that neither factor alone sufficiently explains patterns of cooperation. Drawing on 1,567 documents submitted by World Trade Organization (WTO) members during the Doha Round negotiations (2000–2012), we analyse cooperation between country pairs (dyads) using hurdle models to assess both the likelihood and extent of cooperation. We find that democracies are not uniformly more cooperative but become so only when high levels of trade interdependence exist. Similarly, democracies also cooperate with authoritarian regimes when intensive trade relationships are present. These results challenge the assumption that democratic governance naturally generates cooperation, showing instead that economic incentives play a decisive role. The study advances understanding of international cooperation in complex multilateral negotiation settings.

What should mostly matter is how successful environmental policies are at satisfying citizens’ policy preferences (e.g., reducing carbon emissions), relative to the policies’ cost. Yet, across 6 studies (N = 2759, 2 pre-registered), we found that French citizens tended to be rather insensitive to policy efficiency. In Experiments 1a–d (N = 854), citizens regarded an environmental policy driven by an altruistic intention that turned out to be inefficient as being more commendable than a policy motivated by selfishness that dramatically reduced carbon emissions. In Experiment 2 (N = 1105), altruistic but low efficiency policies were supported only slightly less than selfish but highly efficient policies. Independent manipulation of intent and efficiency indicated low sensitivity to large differences in efficiency expressed numerically, and substantial sensitivity to actors’ intentions. Moreover, moral commitment predicted stronger support for any environmental policy addressing the issue, regardless of its efficiency. Finally, Experiment 3 (N = 800) found that introducing reference points and qualitative appraisals of a policy’s impact and financial cost can nudge participants towards greater attention to its efficiency. Our paper highlights the importance of using contextual and qualitative (vs. numeric) descriptions of policies to make citizens more focused on their efficiency.

During the 1920s, the newly formed American Legion used its unique placement as a nonprofit lobbying for veterans’ causes in a novel way—to enter movie distribution with the creation of its Film Service. The era was famously marked by the consolidation of Hollywood studios into conglomerates and the establishment of their powerful trade association, which moguls used to exert significant control over the emerging medium. Yet while big business was important in structuring the rise of motion pictures, small enterprises—including nonprofits like the Legion Film Service—still found ways to contribute to the sector’s growth by innovating and adapting complex operational strategies, becoming a surprising resource to their well-financed peers in the process. By taking these steps, Legionnaires’ civically minded playbills shaped the development of an industry that projected American cultural and economic influence for the rest of the century.

Assessing systemic risk presents a significant challenge in finance and insurance, where conditional risk measures are essential for capturing contagion effects. This paper introduces two novel systemic risk measures – conditional interval value-at-risk (CoIVaR) and conditional interval expected shortfall (CoIES) – which extend traditional metrics by incorporating interval-based uncertainty. A formal theoretical framework is developed for both measures, offering a detailed characterization of their key properties and risk contributions. We then propose a comprehensive comparison methodology for systemic risk assessment, leveraging stochastic orders, dependence structures, and marginal distributions to establish conditions for ranking risk vectors. Finally, through numerical experiments and real-world stock market applications, we demonstrate the practical utility of CoIVaR and CoIES in quantifying systemic risk under uncertainty. The findings provide valuable insights into systemic risk propagation and establish a robust foundation for risk management in interconnected financial systems.

The German grain legume market is characterized by fragmentation and limited competition, restricting farmers’ market access and legume cultivation. The aim of this study is to analyze the current trader structure and optimize its configurations using k-means clustering. Results reveal a concentration of traders in southern and western Germany, while many farmers lack access to traders, even within a 100 km radius. A more competitive market can be achieved without increasing the number of traders, but by expanding their trading distance between farmers and dealers. Optimized site selection is of central importance in this context. Policy should create incentives – for example, by supporting digital platforms – that encourage farmers to engage with more traders through improved information and transparency, and conversely, motivate traders to expand their service radius via drop shipping.

The financial industry has become increasingly entangled with environmental matters of concern, constituting the phenomenon of ‘green’ finance. In this Forum, we approach green finance as financial climate governance to highlight its claim on finance’s role as legitimate and capable steward of the planet’s climate. This claim to govern and its promise to achieve desirable environmental conditions have made green finance a crucial object of investigation. However, we observe a growing fragmentation of green finance research along various fault lines, such as levels of analysis, normative positions, or academic structures. Calling for reassembling green finance scholarship, we posit a need for more integrative approaches, motivating this Forum’s central question: what integrative moves across socioeconomic research can enhance our understanding and judgement of green finance? The Forum gathers three contributions focused on: (1) integrating macro- and micro-approaches in green finance studies; (2) examining the politics of green finance as knowledge contestations; and (3) confronting stasis in green finance by exploring researchers’ agencies, emotions, and normativities. By reassembling green finance scholarship through integrative moves, we suggest marking green finance as a shared concern and fostering collective perspectives to bring clarity and constructive critique to what has become a dominant pursuit in facing the socioecological crisis.

Low-dimensional representation and clustering of network data are tasks of great interest across various fields. Latent position models are routinely used for this purpose by assuming that each node has a location in a low-dimensional latent space and by enabling node clustering. However, these models fall short through their inability to simultaneously determine the latent space dimension and number of clusters. Here we introduce the latent shrinkage position cluster model (LSPCM), which addresses this limitation. The LSPCM posits an infinite-dimensional latent space and assumes a Bayesian nonparametric shrinkage prior on the latent positions’ variance parameters resulting in higher dimensions having increasingly smaller variances, aiding the identification of dimensions with non-negligible variance. Further, the LSPCM assumes the latent positions follow a sparse finite Gaussian mixture model, allowing for automatic inference on the number of clusters related to non-empty mixture components. As a result, the LSPCM simultaneously infers the effective dimension of the latent space and the number of clusters, eliminating the need to fit and compare multiple models. The performance of the LSPCM is assessed via simulation studies and demonstrated through application to two real Twitter network datasets from sporting and political contexts. Open-source software is available to facilitate widespread use of the LSPCM.

Although forests play a vital role in US climate strategies, US forest area is expected to decline in the coming decades. Policymakers can help arrest or reverse that decline by strengthening incentives for forest carbon sequestration. Increased funding for afforestation, restoration, and bioenergy and wood products market development will likely benefit the forest sector unevenly across geographic, commercial, and demographic dimensions. This review explores the effects of policies – particularly incentives for afforestation and reforestation, carbon credit market participation, and wood products utilization – on US forest communities. We describe this policy landscape and use various data to investigate effects on diverse stakeholders, with special emphasis on the implications for disadvantaged and forest-dependent communities.

Afforestation policies in the South-Central region could significantly enhance carbon dioxide removal while reshaping rural dynamics. Forest carbon credit markets, though crucial for climate goals, may disadvantage small forest owners and communities, instead favoring large corporate entities. Policies promoting wood products in the South-Central region could benefit forest-dependent, high-poverty communities. We also note how policy implementation might ensure an equitable distribution of climate-related benefits among stakeholders in the forest sector.

We propose a one-to-many matching estimator of the average treatment effect based on propensity scores estimated by isotonic regression. This approach is predicated on the assumption of monotonicity in the propensity score function, a condition that can be justified in many economic applications. We show that the nature of the isotonic estimator can help us to fix many problems of existing matching methods, including efficiency, choice of the number of matches, choice of tuning parameters, robustness to propensity score misspecification, and bootstrap validity. As a by-product, a uniformly consistent isotonic estimator is developed for our proposed matching method.

Cross-functional coordination is common in contemporary work and requires professionals with different expertise and roles to cooperate to complete tasks. However, conflicts can exist between functions. This study focuses on a specific factor that impedes cross-functional coordination – status–authority asymmetry, where professionals with lower status are assigned functional authority to supervise higher-status professionals and demand their compliance with particular processes or tasks. The existing literature suggests strategies for the low-status group to elicit the high-status group’s compliance; however, neither approach is cost-effective. We identify new opportunities in the digital age and investigate how low-status professionals can utilize digital technology to improve cross-functional coordination. We conducted a 17-month ethnographic study in a Chinese hospital to determine how low-status pharmacists obtain compliance from high-status doctors in the prescription review process. We propose that contingent exploitation (i.e., strategically restricted utilization of digital technology) is an effective strategy to achieve the low-status function’s purposes. Through strategic configuration of process streamlining, knowledge imprinting, and compliance enforcement, the low-status group can exert functional authority without evoking fierce resistance from the high-status group. This study contributes to the literature on cross-functional coordination and extends our understanding of technological adaptation in a cross-functional context.

Following European pension reforms, the responsibility for old-age provision has increasingly shifted from the state to the individual. This study examines how behavioral norms and perceptions of parents’ or grandparents’ financial situation influence participation in the voluntary second pillar. Using survey data from two Italian provinces with high coverage of supplementary pension funds, the analysis shows that norms transmitted through family and friends strongly predict participation, whereas workplace norms matter only for women. Perceived financial hardship of older relatives increases both awareness of retirement planning and the likelihood of enrollment, underscoring the role of the social environment.

Although economic knowledge constitutes a central element of political governing, people have divergent opinions about its nature and whether it can or should be accessible to everyone. This paper examines the contested role of economic knowledge in Sweden during the Enlightenment, focusing on the philosophical and political contributions of Anders Chydenius (1729–1803). Chydenius published several works and pamphlets on economic matters in the 1760s, the last of which led to his dismissal from the Swedish Diet in 1766. What made this work so politically provocative? I argue that its notoriety stemmed from two key claims: he likened basic economic principles to natural laws, which because of their simplicity all politicians were able to understand, and he believed in making these principles widely available in society. He also acknowledged that different social classes had conflicting interests in monetary policy, contending that, from a national economic perspective, the interests of traders, manufacturers, and workers were more important than those of the aristocratic elite. This perspective not only challenged the established political order but also raised questions about the neutrality and the role of the public in discussions about economic knowledge.

Chung (2023) purports to derive conditions under which a Utilitarian society, which maximizes total welfare, Pareto dominates a Rawlsian society, which maximizes the income of the least advantaged members of society. We show that Chung’s analysis is doubly flawed. First, his analysis assumes that a Rawlsian government chooses an inefficient tax rate when it could do otherwise. Second, his analysis violates his assumption that citizens must choose a non-negative amount of labour. We show that Chung’s headline result does not hold once we enforce this assumption.

As digital connectivity expands and more services become tradable online, international trade is increasingly transitioning into the digital realm. Consequently, the regulatory environment facilitating digital trade has emerged as a central aspect of trade policy. Empirical research plays a vital role in informing the design, implementation, and reform of regulatory policies to facilitate trade in the digital era. However, such research heavily relies on the availability of up-to-date regulatory information across various countries. This paper introduces the Digital Trade Integration (DTI) database, which provides an overview of regulatory policies and practices expected to impact digital trade integration across 146 countries. These measures are organized into 65 indicators and 12 policy pillars covering restrictive and enabling policies. This paper highlights global and regional trends that are considered the four main components of digital trade integration: regulating (Information and Communication Technology) ICT goods, online services, investment in sectors relevant to digital trade, and data. The findings underscore the necessity for ongoing research and policy development to foster an equitable and integrated global digital economy.

This essay argues for an integrative move in the investigation of the politics of ‘green’ finance. We suggest that approaching the politics of ‘green’ finance in the form of knowledge contestations can bring out complementarities and bridge divides between different levels of analysis and theoretical traditions. Our focus is motivated by the pivotal role of knowledge and ignorance in the organisation and governance of financial markets identified in economic sociology, political economy, and neighbouring disciplines. Drawing on this scholarship, we consider knowledge both a forum for and a means of politics. We then illustrate how this conceptualisation provides insights into the politics of ‘green’ finance on different levels of analysis and following different theoretical traditions: in the context of tracing elites in their dissemination of specific ideas shaping governance regimes; when following market devices which produce partial calculative representations of the world; in problematising how financial organisations both produce and accept certain types of knowledge to further their interests; and when examining the role of ideology and imaginative capture in stabilising financial capitalism during climate crisis. We conclude by identifying the connective tissue between these different analytical and theoretical approaches made visible by the integrative concept of politics as knowledge contestations.