American GDP figures published on 28 January 2021 show that the country’s economy continued to grow in Q4 2020 at an annualised rate of 4% compared to the previous quarter. This figure follows on from Q3 2020’s mechanically highly elevated…
Freakonomics is a word for an original way to view the world, by uncovering the influence of economic prompts and cognitive biases in particular on our choices. This type of research purports to reveal unconscious or unexpected factors that are confirmed by scientific studies, and this makes it even more intriguing. But as the astronomer Carl Sagan highlighted, the problem is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. And such evidence does not always exist, as we will see.
What is Modern Slavery?
What has it got to do with business?
What is being done about it in business and management education and research?
The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) require that business know and show that they respect human rights. They can do so by conducting human rights due diligence and by translating and embedding human rights throughout their organization.
In the past Financial Modelling courses I taught, I would always use the same case study for the exams, but often felt the limitations of this. What I wanted for my students was a challenging multi-faceted activity that would make them apply critical thinking in different ways.
Resilience has a broader implication for supply chains affected by wars, natural catastrophes, social and economic upheavals. Resilience is the ability to come back to a previous state after a disruption and be even stronger than before ....
Global warming is an established reality whose effects, which are now tangible for everyone, are potentially harmful for the planet. Yet, it can also bring with it unexpected opportunities...
In this Third Interview of the ThinkForward Conferences cycle, Sergei Guriev discusses key insights from his most recent research about Autocracy and Autocrats. Sergei Guriev is the Scientific Director of Sciences Po's Master's and PhD programmes in economics. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association.
You should change your business model! We regularly hear this injunction from mentors coaching startups or from strategy consultants called by managers to improve the performance of their (small or large) company. This may be true… or not.
The transportation sector is one of the most polluting sectors in the world. Even though alternative fuel vehicles have been around for decades, they only have a very small share in the vehicle market....
We are all trying to figure out what tomorrow holds, either by making our own predictions or by listening intently to those made by others, particularly the experts...
I had once gone to 2-day Design Thinking workshop where the theme was Transportation. Unfotunately, at the end of the journey I still found myself thinking that the problem we tackled was too abstract and the work done during the designing thinking phases too superficial. So when I was asked to teach a Design Thinking course, I really wanted to make sure that my students maximised the value of the design thinking method.
Initially expected to reach around 1.1 billion dollars, the global esports market was valued at just over 950 million U.S. dollars, a 0.8% difference that can be attributed to the cancellation of tournaments and competitions.
And yet, the long-term forecasts for esports remain favourable. The global market revenue should reach 1.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.
In this Second Interview of the ThinkForward Conferences cycle organised by Professors Rodolphe Desbordes and Frédéric Munier,
Richard Davies discusses key insight from his recently published book Extreme Economies
This year’s Nobel prize for Economics was awarded to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, both of Stanford University, for their work on auction theory and design.
In the 1980’s, during my doctoral studies at Yale University, I was very fortunate to have Paul Milgrom as my thesis advisor...
Recently, young environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s visit to France’s National Assembly caused quite a stir. Critics were quick to point out her young age and her lack of scientific credentials. Yet if there is one thing that her detractors cannot deny, it is that her speech has had spectacular and unexpected effects.
Since the mid-2000s, corporate financial reporting in many countries around the world is regulated by International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). This means teaching an international set of standards to an international audience. Interviewing practitioners and leading academics allows me to demonstrate the diversity of practice hidden behind the homogeneity of the rules and the need for judgment.
First Interview of the ThinkForward Conferences cycle organized by Professors Rodolphe Desbordes and Frédéric Munnier.
Stéphanie Chasserio Interviews Zahra Hankir. She is the award-winning, best-selling editor of Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World.
Zahra writes about the intersection of politics, culture, and society in the Middle East. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Vice, BBC News, Al Jazeera English, Businessweek, Roads & Kingdoms, and Literary Hub, among other publications.
Everybody knows Kahoot!, but there are many more tools that you can use to gamify your lessons....
Why do firms work together to contribute to environmental sustainability? Do firms aim for a cleaner environment for future generations or do they intend to benefit from promoting sustainability?
Academic careers depend on the researcher’s capacity to publish scientific articles in the best journals in their field. Publication is the deciding factor for promotion and peer recognition. Women are less present in this race and their numbers decrease the further up the academic ladder we look.
In the field of social psychology, cognitive dissonance is the tension experienced by an individual when their thought system, feelings or behaviour are conflicting. In its own way, slavery placed our societies in a state of cognitive dissonance: the proclamation of human rights coexisted with the reduction of people to the status of objects deprived of rights. To this day, this reality is often overlooked.
Crowdfunding is very new and exciting. It provides new opportunities for startup founding and other activities and proposes creative ways to reward investors. But today, is so new that we are only just becoming aware of all the gaps in our knowledge.
Given the high economic and social costs of the pandemic and the need for an urgent response, the public and private sectors have progressively turned to new sources of financing, and in particular social bonds. These are a form of sustainable market finance which also include a social dimension.
Illegal drug trade, arms and human trafficking, counterfeiting... “Grey globalisation” players have spawned transnational organised crime (TOC) that is difficult to stamp out. Indeed, it is complex on account of its production bases, networks, funding and demand. An analysis of drug trafficking through the lens of consilience provides a better understanding of this issue and its challenges.
Over the course of the 20th century, a spectacular decline in religious practice occurred within Western societies. Numerous studies now indicate that this trend is escalating. A multifactorial analysis provides a better understanding of what is driving this (r)evolution...
After seeing a gap in the current research, we set out to learn how styles of corporate governance affect the choices companies make and the resulting impact.
Twenty-five centuries ago, Confucius is reputed to have said “I see, and I forget, I hear, and I remember, I do, and I understand”. Learning-by-doing goes under the many names: project-based learning, student-centric pedagogy, problem-based education. But how exactly do you get students to engage in active learning?
Accounting is critical for corporate transparency in such times of high uncertainty. Investors, politicians, and society at large are in need of trustworthy information. At the same time, numerous actors take part in producing, distributing, and processing accounting information: from…
The justification for socially responsible investing (SRI) is primarily ethical. Taking into account certain variables of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can also be a source of financial outperformance. In this respect, the promotion of workplace gender equality is an aspect of CSR that can contribute to company performance.
Since fundraising is time-consuming and entails costs, entrepreneurs may want to “test the water” by soliciting investors’ interest before going through the lengthy process to formally convincing a larger number of investors.
Our modern world continues to be plagued by persistent gender inequalities that contrast sharply with the prevailing egalitarian discourse. These inequalities are rooted so deeply in our history that our societies have, in a manner of speaking, “naturalised” them. Of late, some research – notably by Alberto Alesina, a highly respected economist, recently deceased – has endeavoured to shed light on the origins of these inequalities.
The Covid-19 pandemic crisis is affecting our ways of living, travelling, and working. In conditions of lockdown and gradual reopening of businesses, companies around the world had to rapidly deploy large-scale remote work solutions wherever possible and even where it was previously thought to be unfeasible. What are the potential consequences and how can these be addressed?
Karl Popper believed that what defined science was its “refutability” or “falsifiability”. Unlike an ideology, a scientific hypothesis can be refuted if it contains errors. Even so, certain errors persist for a long time and lead to house-of-cards conclusions. If…
Frequently academic management literature is focused on stories of successful companies. The goal of this type of research is to identify what key elements make a company successful, so others could imitate good practices. In our case, a different path…
In these times of great uncertainty, everyone is seeking to better anticipate the future. In the military and intelligence fields, it is striking that, besides tactical or technological solutions, top officials are adopting transdisciplinary approaches similar to consilience.
In 2018, we co-created a pedagogical innovation, The Business Communication Through Drama course. It was designed to help business school students further develop their English language communication skills in addition to acquiring professional competencies through the medium of drama. Why…
We all know about the David against Goliath story and the result of their battle. When applied to startups and large firms, the asymmetry of the situation of the stakeholders usually ends up the other way around. This asymmetry is…
The use of statistics is crucial for anyone wishing to understand how society is evolving. They should be analysed very meticulously though, because the devil is in the detail and one statistic can hide another. Here is a demonstration.
So far, the field of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) does not seem to have made the shift to digital. Yet machine learning and artificial intelligence could be used in several phases of the process for evaluating a target company.
Value measurement is supposed to be one of the strengths of our metric dominated economies. And yet, the true value of things is often ignored, at the risk of ending up with catastrophes.
Richard Davies is an economist based in London. He is a fellow at the London School of Economics and has held senior posts in economic policymaking and journalism. He has been Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers at HM…
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, dividends are the source of many debates and disagreements. On 24 March, the French Minister of the Economy and Finance, Bruno Le Maire, urged French companies to exercise the utmost restraint in paying dividends in 2020 and stated that companies in which the State is a shareholder would be asked not to pay dividends.
By reinventing our learning system, the SKEMA faculty is first of all giving learners the means to navigate a complex world (more broadly speaking, VUCA), by extending the school’s teaching beyond the disciplines of administration and management, and to develop their critical thinking abilities by exposing them to the realities of the world.
Godwin’s law asserts that “as an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.” More generally speaking, the longer a debate goes on the higher the likelihood of using extreme analogies. It would seem that the current rivalry between China and the United States is no exception to this rule.
Ever thought about working for yourself, with your own business? Well, think before you act!
It is not unusual to read that private players threaten state prerogatives. A detailed analysis of the situation, including through the prism of international investment agreements, gives this idea a certain credibility while shedding some new light on it.
It is undeniable that studying abroad is a rich and valuable experience for our students, enabling them to adapt and work well in multicultural environments and encouraging greater open-mindedness and cultural awareness. However, we noticed that the students were often unable…
In a complex world, it is no longer possible to content ourselves with deeper but disjointed knowledge. Consilience or “the unity of knowledge” is a way to approach the problems and challenges of our time by interconnecting fields of knowledge…
From the first week of November, women in the United States, Ireland, UK, and around the world are effectively working for free as the gender gap in average pay earnings accounts for remaining two months’ salary of the year. The gender pay gap has remained remarkably constant…
