This article analyses a domestic litigation matter seeking to establish accountability for air pollution-related human rights violations. It examines how the judiciary applied national and international law to dismiss the case on procedural grounds. It argues that the domestic case deserves careful reading for a number of reasons that can be distilled into two premises. Firstly, the national legal framework and its respective judicial interpretation impede access to justice for victims of state and/or corporate human rights violations. Secondly, it is essential that the state develops laws and policies in line with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which would allow claimants to focus their argumentation on material, rather than procedural issues relevant to proving the merits of the case.

Using random H-1B visa lotteries as a natural experiment, we find that firms respond to shortages of high-skilled workers by acquiring firms that employ such workers. The effect is stronger among firms with high human capital and more senior workforces, firms facing tight labor markets and legal barriers to poaching workers, and firms lacking foreign affiliates. The acquired workers are highly educated, sharing skills and occupations similar to those of the acquirer’s existing workers. Our findings suggest skilled labor is an important driver of acquisitions and acquiring is an effective means of obtaining skilled labor.

Using a novel data set of over 3,500 public and private firms, we construct the network of executive and director connections prior to the 1929 financial market crash. We find that more connected firms have 17% higher 10-year survival rates. Consistent with a working capital channel, the results are strongest for small, private, cash-poor firms, and firms located in counties with high bank suspension rates. Moreover, connections to cash-rich firms that increase accounts receivable matter the most. Our results suggest that network connections can play a stabilizing role during a financial crisis by easing the flow of capital to constrained firms.

As its practitioners know well, benefit-cost analysis (BCA) walks a fine line between the positive and normative, between the science of economics and the art of political economy. Missteps threaten to undermine its credibility as a value-free science, while overcaution risks irrelevance to the pressing questions of the day. As BCA adapts to give more weight to distributional concerns, while operating in a more highly charged political environment than ever before, these tensions will only grow. For perspective, I reexamine three prominent episodes in the history of economics where these issues were vigorously debated: (i) The founding of the NBER by Wesley Clair Mitchell, who insisted that the organization eschew all policy recommendations; (ii) the introduction of the modern definition of economics as the study of tradeoffs by Lionel Robbins, who insisted welfare effects could never be aggregated; and (iii) the origins of BCA as a measure of income, which to first-generation practitioners seemed to foreclose the possibility of measuring “intangible” benefits like recreation opportunities, mortality risks, and equity. These episodes, together with critiques of economics from philosophers of science, suggest we are best served by being as transparent as possible about the ways values influence BCA reasoning, without arrogating political decisions into it.

A eurozone exit or breakup exposes bondholders to currency redenomination risk. I quantify redenomination risk since the sovereign debt crisis: It contributes substantially to credit spreads around changes in government in France and Italy. Bond prices suggest that markets have priced a potential Italian exit as isolated, and a French one as a breakup. Unlike conventional default risk, redenomination risk can be negative depending on the strength of the national “shadow” currency. Countries with strong shadow currencies earn breakup-insurance premia from the eurozone analog of “exorbitant privilege.” Yield effects are quantitatively large for implied exit probabilities as low as 1%.

The ‘Mind the Gap’ project has created a toolkit for civil society to hold companies to account for their adverse impacts. The toolkit sets out two distinct but interlinked frameworks: harmful corporate strategies resulting in the avoidance of responsibility for adverse impacts, and civil society counter-strategies to overcome these harmful strategies. Both frameworks capture the unique experiences of the Mind the Gap project’s global consortium partners and civil society actors focused on corporate accountability. The project responds to a need to close governance gaps that arise in the context of the current global economic system. It is only by identifying and understanding harmful corporate strategies that civil society can effectively advocate for corporate accountability and the closure of governance gaps.

This piece analyses the recent judgment from the Makhanda High Court in Sustaining the Wild Coast NPC v Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy setting aside the decision to grant Shell and Impact Africa an exploratory right. Shell and Impact Africa intended to conduct a seismic survey along South Africa’s Wild Coast. Such a survey stood to have a substantial impact on the rights and interests of several local communities residing along the coastline. Because Shell, Impact Africa and the Director-General of the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy failed to consider these rights and interests, the court decided to overturn the decision granting the companies their exploratory right. To this end, the judgment provides a powerful vindication of the rights of local communities, illustrating what is possible when regulatory schemes are applied purposively and not as a mere box-ticking exercise.