Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds are among the fastest-growing investment styles. ESG investing thereby has a governing effect, and a key open question is whether ESG merely reduces risks for investors or whether it can have a sustainability impact and actively contribute to...

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) funds are among the fastest growing investment styles. ESG funds can be used either to only mitigate risk (input ESG) or to go beyond that to create impact (output ESG). We argue that the governance by ESG is characterised by three potential...

The financial crisis of 2007-09 soon morphed into a crisis of public debt. This paper argues that the way the Eurozone crisis was discursively constructed led to a large scale entrenchment of European welfare states. First of all, how the crisis was constructed did not reflect its actual causes...

The paper analyses the divergent outcomes of post-crisis derivative regulation in Europe. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, most regulatory issues only represent incremental changes of existing practices and incentives, tweaking rather than reforming the financial system and, mostly,...

In the current European crisis, neoliberal ideas dictate the policy agenda. The propagated solution in the European economic misery is “internal devaluation”: Austerity and labour market flexibilisation are the main goals of economic policy making. Focusing on labour market flexibilisation,...

Critical macro-finance (CMF) has become an influential avenue of research aimed at shedding light on how the global payments system is governed. In the introduction to this special forum on CMF, we explore three main themes: (1) the intellectual lineage of CMF and its relation to...