Although a growing stream of research investigates the role of government in corporate social responsibility (CSR), little is known about how governmental CSR interventions interact in financial markets. This article addresses this gap through a longitudinal study of the socially responsible investment (SRI) market in France. Building on the “CSR and government” and “regulative capitalism” literatures, we identify three modes of governmental CSR intervention—regulatory steering, delegated rowing, and microsteering—and show how they interact through the two mechanisms of layering (the accumulation of interventions) and catalyzing (the alignment of interventions). Our findings: 1) challenge the notion that, in the neoliberal order, governments are confined to steering market actors—leading and guiding their behavior—while private actors are in charge of rowing—providing products and services; 2) show how governmental CSR interventions interact and are orchestrated; and 3) provide evidence that governments can mobilize financial markets to promote CSR.

This article explores the development of railway nationalism and «railway imperialism» within Colombian politics during the early 20th century. It uses the experience of the hitherto unstudied Great Northern Central Railway of Colombia British «free-standing company» as a lens to evaluate the way in which these political currents impacted railway development in the Colombian department of Santander. It argues that the rise of railway nationalism intertwined with regionalism and personal interests represents an important and unacknowledged factor in the collapse of the British company, as well as the overall lack of railway expansion and subsequent economic decline in the department.

Interest in the growth of tradeable securities in early modern Britain, especially its relationship to economic development and the funding of government debt, has centered mainly on the borrower – whether it be trading company, industrial enterprise, or the state. This article directs attention to the investor, using Charity Commission Reports for England and Wales that document a dramatic mid-eighteenth-century shift by donors and trustees from investments in real estate and rent charges to perpetual government annuities, mainly 3 percent Consols. The heavy investment in this public debt product is what ultimately prompted the creation of the London Stock Exchange in 1801.

In analyzing this shift, which occurred among the propertied in all regions of the nation, not just the metropolis or among corporate entities and the mercantile community, I consider both what made the annuities increasingly attractive for charitable trusts and the alternatives – real estate and private loans secured by mortgage or other means – more problematic. Legal changes, I argue, played a role in the transformation, especially the Charitable Uses Act of 1736, which made charitable devises of real estate very difficult and probably resulted in reduced investment in human capital and less wealth redistribution. Regions varied, however, in the degree to which they switched from real estate in the latter part of the eighteenth century; they also differed in the extent to which the switch resulted in more gifts of interest-bearing loans as well.

Admittedly, the changes documented in this article concern only one type of depository for assets, charitable trusts. The appeal of these annuities, however, could extend to investments needed for other purposes such as postmortem payments to dependents. Moreover, the fall-off in demand for real estate in trusts correlates with GDP estimates showing a steady decline in income from real assets after 1755 and what some have noted in this period as a puzzle – the lack of an increased rate of return on rents and private loans at a time of robust investment in government debt. Most importantly, though, the transition demonstrates the ability of the government to induce a broad spectrum of the propertied population to invest in securities, if the vehicle they offered had the right characteristics, which were not necessarily highest yield or liquidity without loss in value.

As part of the roundtable “World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It),” this essay argues that an ideal state of peace might not be attainable, but a positive form of peace could be achieved on a global scale if states and peoples made a serious investment—comparable to their investment in military expenditure—in promoting the kind of mutual cultural understanding that reduces tensions and divisions and fosters cooperation. Peacemaking usually focuses on diplomatic and military détente; the argument in this essay is that these endeavors, though obviously important, are not by themselves enough for the best attainable kind of peace, for which the further and even more important aim of cultural entente is essential. This implies that peacemaking activities need to apply vastly more effort to intercultural and interpersonal exchange and education.

Increasingly, decentralization is being adopted by countries in which assumptions made by formal models of decentralization, such as electoral accountability and population mobility, fail to hold. How does decentralization affect public service delivery in such contexts? The authors exploit the partial rollout of decentralization in the autocratic context of Ethiopia and use a spatial regression discontinuity design to identify its effects. Decentralization improves delivery of productive services, specifically, agricultural services, but has no effect on social services, specifically, drinking water services. This finding is consistent with a model in which local leaders have superior information about the public investments that will deliver the greatest returns and they are incentivized by decentralization to maximize citizens’ production—on which rents depend—rather than citizens’ utility. These findings shed light on nonelectoral mechanisms through which decentralization affects public goods provision and help to explain decentralization’s mixed effects in many nondemocratic settings.

In recent years, two soft law instruments have emerged to promote sustainable development in the Arctic, namely the Arctic Investment Protocol by the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Arctic and the Arctic Economic Council’s Code of Ethics. These instruments seek to foster sustainable development through responsible investment and good business practices. The emergence of these soft law instruments by non-State actors demonstrates an interest from the business sector and Arctic stakeholders to develop business norms and standards of sustainable development that are specific to the region. In understanding the potential and scope of these instruments, this paper considers the role of both instruments in driving sustainable development in the Arctic.

What characteristics of firms give them the confidence to invest in settings rife with expropriation by local officials? Empirically, firms in the developing world often face the threat of expropriation from local agents of the state rather than a centralized autocrat. Because policing local officials is costly, the state cannot easily credibly commit to doing so. This has negative consequences for investment. We argue that one solution is to allow firms to approach the state directly to ask for intervention. Not all firms are equally able to successfully get the attention of the state, however, so this mechanism only works for some. We develop an argument about the firm-level characteristics – large-scale employment, political connections, foreign ownership, and business association membership – that should make the central state more attentive to calls for help. Because firm with these characteristics are more likely to secure intervention against predatory bureaucrats, the latter are less likely to try to expropriate them. These firms' investment decisions should be less sensitive to local expropriation than other firms. We test this argument using data on cases of decentralized expropriation across Russia's regions and firm-level data from a cross-regional, large scale survey of Russian firms.

Systematic accounts of East Asian government responses to the ‘limits of productivist regimes’ (Gough, 2004) remain surprisingly rare. This article develops three distinct types of East Asian welfare development, i.e. quantitative, type-specific, and radical, employing set-theoretic methods. It then uses these types to analyse six policy fields, including education, health care, family policy, old-age pensions, public housing, and passive labour market policy, in six East Asian societies: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. We find that all cases except Hong Kong and Singapore have experienced at least one radical shift in their welfare models over the past three decades (1990–2016). East Asian governments have increasingly combined quantitative expansion or retrenchment of ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ policy structures but have done so in unique ways. South Korea has followed the most ‘balanced’ approach to welfare development and stands out as the best candidate for further type-specific expansions moving forward.

Recent work on optimal monetary and fiscal policy in New Keynesian models has tended to focus on policy set by an infinitely lived benevolent policy maker, often with access to a commitment technology. In this paper, we explore deviations from this ideal, by allowing (time-consistent) policy to be set by a process of bargaining between two political players with different weights on elements of the social welfare function. We characterize the (linear) Markov perfect equilibrium and, in a series of numerical examples, we explore the resultant policy response to shocks which cannot be perfectly offset with the available instruments due to their fiscal consequences. We find that, even although the players, on average, have the socially desirable objective function, the process of bargaining implies an outcome which deviates from the time-consistent policy chosen by the benevolent policy maker. Moreover, the range of instruments available mean that policy makers will bargain across the entire policy mix, sometimes implying outcomes which are quite different from those that would be chosen by a single policy maker. These policy outcomes depend crucially on the nature of the conflict and also the level of government debt.

Childcare policies have become an important element of social investment reforms, but in most countries access to childcare has remained socially unequal. Some studies have suggested that a trend towards more gender egalitarian work–family attitudes has facilitated the expansion of childcare provision. Yet, we know little about the repercussions of an unequal expansion of childcare provision on public attitudes towards the work–family nexus. Building on multilevel models of 18 European countries and two waves of the International Social Survey Programme, this analysis examines the effects of an unequal childcare expansion on attitudes towards maternal employment. The results reveal that individuals with lower income remain more skeptical of maternal employment when childcare provision is highly unequal. The unequally distributed benefits of an expansion of childcare provision contribute to a divergence of attitudes across socio-economic groups, which might create a more difficult political terrain for the implementation of expansive social investment reforms.

This article assesses different approaches currently discussed and developed in international human rights and investment law to establish investor obligations. The article begins with a general framework of analysing and comparing these approaches. Next, attempts to include direct obligations of business entities in international human rights treaties are discussed. Despite earlier indications the recent initiative to create a legally binding instrument on business and human rights will most likely not include direct obligations for business entities. Subsequently, the article assesses the development of investor obligations in new international investment treaties and through the interpretation and application of existing international investment agreements. Arguably, the former will not lead to binding obligations in the foreseeable future and the latter rests on methodologically questionable grounds. Consequently, the article suggests that the way forward will require domestic legislation in host and home states to establish investor obligations which can be taken into account when interpreting existing investment treaty clauses requiring the investor to adhere to domestic law. This would reflect recent trends both in investment law reforms as well as the business and human rights movement.