The purpose of this research is to examine why some companies commit to ambitious targets to address climate change while others do not. I will investigate how climate movement protests affect a company’s targets, and whether this relationship is exacerbated when natural events lend empirical credibility to activist’s climate-change concerns.

Wind power is a sustainable and renewable energy. Much of it is produced in off-shore windfarms. How should governments design auctions to select and incentivise electricity companies to build and maintain off-shore windfarms? Researchers of the Universities of Amsterdam and Groningen will run laboratory experiments to address this question.

The year 2016 was a the turning point for CSR activities for Japanese firms as a new policy was put in place that made non-financial performance a part of investment decision criteria. This project tries to understand: How did the new government CSR policy impact firms’ CSR performance?

Access to affordable medical treatments may be endangered by the current bargaining system, in which the prices countries pay remain secret. Proponents of price confidentiality claim that it enables price cuts for poorer countries. In a laboratory experiment, we provide empirical evidence on the effects of price transparency in bargaining.

Dissemination:

• N. Franzen, A. Ziegler, G. Romagnoli, V.P. Retèl, T.J.S. Offerman & W.H. van Harten (2022). Affordable Prices Without Threatening the Oncological R&D Pipeline—An Economic Experiment on Transparency in Price Negotiations, Cancer Research Communications, 2(1), 49–57. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1158/2767-9764.CRC-21-0031
• N. Franzen, A. Ziegler, G. Romagnoli, V.P. Retèl, T.J.S. Offerman & W.H. van Harten (2022). Improving the Affordability of Anticancer Medicines Demands Evidence-Based Policy Solutions. Cancer Discovery, 12(2), 299–302. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-21-1153
• https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5795132 (dataset)

Childlessness is an under-explored but crucial dimension of inequality among men, associated with individual and social issues like depression, premature deaths and crime. This project will produce the first systematic analysis of the evolution and socio-economic composition of childless men in different parts of the world.

Auctions are major funding sources for governments – especially in times of elevated spending such as the corona crisis. We plan to test if higher lending-costs increase issurance costs and therefore governments’ costs-of-debt. By connecting lending-costs to the lending programmes of central banks we aim to develop policy implications.

Current biodiversity loss exceeds the background extinction beyond safe planetary boundaries. Most pressure is due to human activities, making it unlikely that we can grow ourselves out of this biodiversity crisis. The symposium 'Post-growth perspectives on biodiversity conservation' explores how to provide for the conservation sustainably with non-increasing conservation budgets.

CEOs are increasingly turning away from the shareholder-centric approach to corporate governance, and policymakers are initiating steps to improve the sustainability of corporations. This symposium brings together industry leaders, policymakers, and academics to discuss legal developments in Europe and the US regarding the purpose of the corporation and stakeholder inclusion.

How to accommodate market behaviour to create a sustainable society? Addressing this pressing question requires a deep understanding of human decision-making in many domains, including energy use, food consumption and mobility choices. At the symposium, researchers from different fields of economics and business present their recent research on these topics.

As consumers play a crucial role in the transition towards a more sustainable, circular economy, companies need to identify ways for changing consumer behaviour. This project addresses the question when and why corporate behaviour change campaigns are effective, in terms of consumers’ sustainability behaviours and their responses toward the company.