Publications related to Environmental, social, and corporate governance

Artificial intelligence of things for synergizing smarter eco-city brain, metabolism, and platform: Pioneering data-driven environmental governance

Emerging smarter eco-cities, inherently intertwined with environmental governance, function as experimental sites for testing novel technological solutions and implementing environmental reforms aimed at addressing complex challenges. However, despite sign ...

Elsevier2024

The synergistic interplay of artificial intelligence and digital twin in environmentally planning sustainable smart cities: A comprehensive systematic review

Jeffrey Huang, Simon Elias Bibri

The dynamic landscape of sustainable smart cities is witnessing a signi ficant transformation due to the integration of emerging computational technologies and innovative models. These advancements are reshaping data -driven planning strategies, practices, ...

Elsevier2024

Smart cities and sustainable development goals (SDGs): A systematic literature review of co-benefits and trade-offs

Simon Elias Bibri

Despite the wealth of research on smart cities, there is a lack of studies examining interlinkages between smart cities and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In other words, there is limited research on how implementing smart city solutions can lead to ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2023

Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Threats in the Era of Grand Societal Challenges

Enrico Bergamini

We live in an era defined by attempts to grapple with an ever-expanding array of grand societal challenges (GCs). These challenges comprise transformational social and environmental issues, such as environmental degradation and global pandemics, and the cr ...

EPFL2023

Nine recommendations for the governance of AI systems

Marie-Valentine Renée Agnès Florin

Some governance functions traditionally performed by humans are increasingly informed and sometimes automatically executed by machine learning algorithms (governance by machine learning) to benefit society. Therefore, it is necessary to think also about th ...

EPFL2022

How to link sustainability assessments with local governance? – Connecting indicators to institutions and controversies

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Albert Merino, Pekka Jaakko Halla

The concept of sustainability is growing in importance for local urban governance, and indicator-based assessments represent a popular means for its operationalization. While much effort has been spent developing the technical aspects of these assessments, ...

2022

Measures against the abandonment of common property summer pastures: experimental evidence from joint appropriation-provision games

Ivo Philippe Baur

Common property summer pastures constitute longstanding evidence that the tragedy of the commons can be prevented through self-organization. As a byproduct of their sustainable governance, high nature value farming systems with well-integrated patchy lands ...

RESILIENCE ALLIANCE2021

Combatting climate change through a portfolio of approaches

Marie-Valentine Renée Agnès Florin

Given the urgency of deploying all possible ways to combat climate change, and in light of lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak that it was a mistake to ignore signals and not prepare for worst-case scenarios, this article suggests that tech ...

International Risk Governance Center (IRGC)2021

COVID-19: A risk governance perspective

One effect of the COVID-19 crisis has been to require policymakers to go through the various stages of the risk governance process under conditions of high stress and compressed timescales. In this article we use our risk governance framework to outline th ...

EPFL International Risk Governance Council (IRGC)2020

Indicators for urban sustainability: Key lessons from a systematic analysis of 67 measurement initiatives

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Albert Merino, Valeria Superti, Pekka Jaakko Halla, Anne Frédérique Cécile Noémi Bösch

Today, the centrality of cities in the global sustainability challenge is widely acknowledged, and numerous initiatives have been developed worldwide for monitoring and comparing the sustainability performance of urban areas. However, the escalating abunda ...

2020

The Effect of European Integration on Swiss Energy Policy and Governance

Matthias Finger, Paul Adrianus Van Baal

The unique “Swiss way” of association with the European Union (EU) has received increasing attention in light of recent events such as Brexit as it is based on sectoral agreements without an overarching institutional framework. As such, Europeanization of ...

2019

Strategic Objectives For State-Owned Enterprises As A Means To Mitigate Political Interference: An Empirical Analysis Of Two Swiss State-Owned Enterprises

Matthias Finger, Fabian Liechti

When governments act as owners of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), they are both principal and agent at the same time. The literature on steering SOEs has mainly focused on the government as the principal that must control SOEs. However, the government is a ...

WILEY2019

Sustainable Development, Planning and Poverty Alleviation

Jean-Claude Bolay, Eléonore Labattut

In 2018, the world population is around 7.6 billion, 4.2 billion in urban settlements and 3.4 billion in rural areas. Of this total, according to UN-Habitat, 3.2 billion of urban inhabitants live in southern countries. Of them, one billion, or nearly a thi ...

2019

Agency conflicts around the world

Erwan Morellec, Boris Nikolov

We use a dynamic model of financing decisions to measure agency conflicts for a large panel of 12,652 firms from 14 countries. Our estimates show that agency conflicts are large and vary significantly across firms and countries. Differences in agency confl ...

2018

Linking spatial characteristics to residential lifestyles. A framework for analysing the hospitality potential of urban and architectural designs

Vincent Kaufmann, Sophie Lufkin, Emmanuel Rey, Marie-Paule Thomas

Today, in many European countries, increasing opposition tends to thwart urban densification projects. To enhance public acceptability of such projects, which are likely to promote sustainable urban development, it is essential to better anticipate urban p ...

2018

The Significance of Corporate Social Disclosure for High-Tech Manufacturing Companies: Focus on Employee and Community Aspects of Sustainable Development

Gökan May

Addressing a global key sector area - the high technology manufacturing sector - we examine if there is truly a benefit of corporate social disclosure to the bottom line of organizations within this sector and if stakeholders should devote more attention t ...

Wiley2017

Do exogenous changes in passive institutional ownership affect corporate governance and firm value?

Rüdiger Fahlenbrach

We investigate whether corporations and their executives react to an exogenous change in passive institutional ownership and alter their corporate governance structure. We find that exogenous increases in passive ownership lead to increases in CEO power an ...

Elsevier Science Sa2017

Environomic design of vehicle integrated energy systems

Zlatina Kirilova Dimitrova

To meet the targets of sustainable development and greenhouse emission reduction of the future vehicles fleet, the automotive industry needs to deploy cost-competitive and efficient advanced energy conversion systems for the future commercial personal vehi ...

EPFL2015

The usability of green building rating systems in hot arid climates: A case study in Siwa, Egypt

Shady Galal Mohamed Attia

In the last three years there has been a proliferation of regional building rating systems across the Middle East. Most those emerging rating systems and labels imitate the British and American rating systems BREEAM and LEED that emerge from an impact redu ...

2013