Conference Agenda

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to firm-level initiatives that improve environmental performance, social outcomes, or governance and now underpins a global asset market exceeding $30 trillion. I argue that an important, understudied driver of CSR’s rise is that sustainability has become a valued job attribute, turning CSR into a strategic tool for attracting and retaining talent. To quantify this mechanism, I develop a labor market model in which workers’ utility depends on firms’ CSR choices and estimate it using a matched employer–employee dataset covering all French firms combined with detailed CSR metrics. Importantly, my framework accounts for unobserved worker and firm heterogeneity in productivity, mitigating biases in simple wage comparisons. Two-way fixed effect estimates show that a standard deviation increase in a firm’s sustainability score is associated with a 2.5 to 8% reduction in hourly wages. The estimated relationship varies significantly over time and across firms, suggesting heterogeneous incentives to engage in CSR. This also implies that policies aimed at stimulating CSR investment can affect wage-setting and workforce composition, and should be designed taking firm labour-related motives into account.

Although consumers may wish to act in environmentally responsible ways, informational barriers often prevent them from accurately understanding the true environmental costs of their consumption choices. In this paper, we investigate how environmental costs, such as CO2 emissions, electric energy consumption, and water usage, affect the intention to purchase secondhand clothing. Using multiple price lists, we measure stated changes in purchasing intention and incentivized choices, as well as willingness to accept (WTA) and willingness to pay (WTP) for vouchers at first-hand versus second-hand clothing stores. We draw on a large, nationally representative sample of Italians (N = 10,496). First, we find that providing information is effective in promoting secondhand adoption across all types of environmental costs; water-based information generates the strongest effect. Second, we find that pro-environmental behavior amplifies responsiveness to information. However, the need for uniqueness acts as a significant barrier; these individuals require approximately €2 more compensation to switch to secondhand options. Third, local environmental conditions, including water scarcity, energy poverty, and air quality, do not systematically moderate treatment effects. We also found that store proximity influences baseline preferences, but does not moderate the effects of information provision. Our findings indicate that consumers respond to various environmental indicators, demonstrating a particular sensitivity to water usage compared to CO2 emissions. However, significant portions of the public remain disengaged from sustainability information.

We study the returns to green tasks — the green job wage premium — and its drivers using online job vacancy (OJV) data for 29 EU countries over the period 2018-2023. We use a transparent LLM to classify skills as green and define vacancies as green when they list at least one green skill. Green jobs pay a premium of 4.8% relative to comparable postings within the same occupation, controlling for nonmonetary job attributes making these jobs more attractive. Roughly half of this premium is explained by firm fixed effects, consistent with an important role for firm rents. An Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition reveals that, of the remaining half, one third is explained by the higher skill complexity of green jobs and two thirds (about 1%) reflects the residual return to green tasks. The green wage premium is higher outside the manufacturing sector, in low-carbon roles and in densely populated areas.

Ensuring reliable provision of high-quality goods and services remains a central challenge in many markets. This paper studies how reputation interacts with entry regulation and shapes optimal regulatory policies using empirical, theoretical, and quantitative approaches. Empirically, I show that an entry deregulation reform in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) industry leads to a persistent decline in service quality. I also document that negative reputation shocks sharply reduce firms' market share by half, indicating that both regulation and reputation are powerful devices. Theoretically, I develop a firm entry game in which reputation partially substitutes for regulatory screening, weakening the quality-improving effect of entry barriers. Structurally, I estimate a dynamic oligopoly model within a Moment-based Markov Equilibrium framework that incorporates endogenous reputation formation. Counterfactual simulations reveal that accounting for reputation substantially alters the optimal stringency and timing of entry regulations. These results underscore that effective regulation in emerging markets must be designed jointly with the market’s reputation forces.