Alternative currencies are means of payment that circulate alongside—as an alternative or complement to—official currencies. While these currencies have existed for a long time, both society and academia have shown a renewed interest in their potential to decentralize the governance of monetary affairs and to bring people and organizations together in more ethical or sustainable ways. This article is a review of the ethical and philosophical implications of these alternative monetary projects. We first discuss various classifications of these currencies before analyzing the ethical challenges linked to the way they tackle social and environmental issues. We also examine the incentive-based and coercive mechanisms used by these currencies from an ethical perspective and debate the promises and perils of monetary decentralization and democracy. We conclude by identifying an agenda for future research.

China has experienced significant capital flight over the past two decades. Despite anecdotal evidence that some of this capital has been invested in foreign residential markets, not much is known about its destination and impact. We examine the effects of capital inflows from China on residential property prices and the real economy in the USA and global metropolitan areas. We show that inflows had significant effects on residential property markets and employment in regions that i) have strong ethnic ties to China and ii) are destinations of Chinese students. We document spillovers to geographically adjacent regions without strong Chinese links.

We synthetically create option contracts on a corporate bond index using CDX swaptions, overcoming the limitations that stem from the lack of traded corporate bond options. Our approach allows us to estimate forward-looking moments concerning the corporate bond market in a model-free manner. By constructing an aggregate volatility measure and the associated variance risk premium, we examine the role of volatility risk in the corporate bond market. We highlight that the ex ante conditional second and higher moments we estimate from synthetic corporate bond options carry important implications for credit risk models, providing an extra basis for testing their validity.

While Coca-Cola portrays itself as a ‘water neutrality’ leader, its failures during Cape Town’s water crisis exemplify the changing nature of corporate human rights obligations in the face of climate change. Between 2015 and 2018, drought conditions plunged Cape Town into a crisis, leading to increasingly strict household water restrictions and depriving families of their constitutionally guaranteed water allowance.1 However, in December 2017, when Cape Town officials called for a 45% reduction in commercial water use, Coca-Cola’s local independent bottler – Coca-Cola Peninsula Beverages (CCPB) – refused to reduce its 44 million-litre monthly withdrawals.2 The city subjected households to water restrictions and price increases up to 556%, while businesses only saw a 104% price increase with no consumption restrictions.3

We find that an increase in a firm’s incentives to use trade secrets to protect its intellectual property results in a more actively managed capital structure. Exploiting U.S. states’ adoption of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act as a positive “shock” in the protection afforded to trade secrets, we find that firms covered by the Act reduce debt levels while increasing investments in intangibles. Additional tests suggest that firms fund these financing and investment activities by issuing more equity. Consistent with an increase in overall intangibility magnifying contracting problems with creditors, we find that covered firms experience higher costs of debt.

This article addresses the question of how standards were determined and disseminated in an era before the formation of agreed upon standards or the existence of governing bodies, by examining the case of nineteenth-century Brazil. It argues that the experience in Brazil was similar to that of other nations: individuals engaged in mathematical, scientific, engineering, and statistical organizations created networks of professional societies, intertwined with international diplomacy and domestic legislators, to promote the adoption of the metric system. It analyzes the process from idea to advocacy culminating in national implementation on the eve of the 1875 International Convention of the Meter, to which Brazil was signatory.

Our selection and endogeneity corrected findings suggest that firms' political connections negatively influence their market value. We find that firms with a larger size, more operationally efficient in utilizing their assets, and those operating in more concentrated industries benefit more from the political connections than the otherwise corresponding firms. We also report that political connections do not influence firms' leverage choices. However, we find that politically connected firms with higher leverage have significantly lower market value. Further, we note that political connections help the firms operating in unregulated but more concentrated industries, probably to obtain ‘private benefits’, leading to their higher market value. Overall, our results indicate that the effect of political connections is not homogeneous across the sample firms. They also raise questions on the motivation of sample firms' political connections, suggesting that these firms probably obtain political connections for reasons other than enhancing their market value.

How is the tension between conflict and deliberation resolved in shareholder engagement? We address this question by studying shareholder engagement as a deliberative process with three stages: establishing dialogue, solution development, and solution implementation. We theorize that two interactionist mechanisms, deliberative interaction and the voicing of disagreement, play different roles at different stages of the process. We test our hypotheses with a proprietary database of 169 environmental, social, and governance engagements with US public companies over 2007–12. We find that while deliberative interaction does not help advance the engagement process, it positively moderates the effect of disagreement in the solution development stage. By contrast, in the solution implementation stage, deliberative interaction amplifies the negative effect of disagreement, thus hindering progress in the engagement. Our article contributes to shareholder engagement, deliberation theory, and interactionist organization theory by establishing that engagement effectiveness is an interactional achievement shaped by both deliberation and disagreement.

Due to COVID-19, many households faced hardships in the spring of 2020 – unemployment, an uncertain economic future, forced separation, and more. At the same time, the number of people who participated in outdoor recreation in many areas increased, as it was one of the few activities still permitted. How these experiences affect the public’s willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental public goods is unknown. During the early months of the pandemic, we conducted a stated preference survey to value statewide water quality improvements in Delaware. While a majority of participants report experiencing hardship of some sort (economic, emotional, etc.), mean household WTP declined by only 7 % by May 2020.

China’s reemergence among the world’s leading economic and political powers has been one of the most defining changes in the international order since the end of the Cold War. Underpinning China’s ascent were the economic reforms instituted across the late 1970s and early 1980s that opened its economy to foreign direct investments. Preceding these reforms were the ambitions entertained for China’s continental shelf, optimistically forecasting it as nothing less than “the world’s richest petroleum reservoir.” This article will attempt to link these phenomena by examining the economic readjustment in conjunction with the capital- and technology-intensive requirements of the offshore oil industry. It will explore how petroleum knowledge was diffused between Norway and China: notably, how Chinese reformers abandoned the Daqinigst doctrine of self-reliance in favor of a hybrid Norwegian model of petroleum governance. Even though exploration efforts proved disappointing, the episode had both long-term political and commercial ramifications. It was during this often-overlooked episode of Chinese, international, and indeed Norwegian petroleum history that Norway’s national oil company, Statoil, took its first steps outside the Norwegian continental shelf and inspired the formation of China’s own national offshore oil company, China National Offshore Oil Corporation.

This study builds on the relatively limited work examining police officer identity, dedication, and organisation citizenship behaviours (OCB), by connecting illegitimate tasks to these outcomes. From the textual analysis of focus group responses by members of an Australian state police service, a clear social identity of ‘copper’ emerged among constables, and when this copper identity was threatened, the constables' dedication and levels of OCB depleted. The most serious threat to that identity was the need to perform illegitimate tasks based on perceived time-wasting activities. However, a new negative phenomenon, tasks reducing professional discretion, emerged as a third type of illegitimate task. The study also indicates that future studies of police dedication and OCB depletion need to consider the negative socio-political aspects of managerialism.