Environmental concerns are becoming more pressing as the climate emergency intensifies, posing a major challenge for many governments: increasing green investments to promote better adaptation and resilience to climate events, while maintaining fiscal discipline. This raises the question of whether governments that operate under fiscal rules tend to safeguard environmental spending in light of the climate emergency, or whether they are more inclined to scale it back to meet their fiscal targets, given that such investments require substantial public funding. Using data covering 31 advanced economies between 1995 and 2021, we find robust evidence that the strengthening of fiscal rules significantly reduces environmental spending, in particular debt rules and expenditure rules. Moreover, the adverse impact of fiscal rules on environmental expenditures is amplified during election periods, whereas it is mitigated in the presence of sound past fiscal conditions, the Kyoto Protocol, and stringent environmental policies. Further analysis reveals that although fiscal rules tend to reduce environmental spending, they are associated with greater efficiency in such spending.

This study examines how epidemic outbreaks influence foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in developing countries, with a particular focus on whether healthcare systems can act as buffers during such shocks. Using a panel dataset of 98 countries from 2000 to 2022, the analysis combines two-way fixed effects (FE) models and the Local Projection Method (LPM). The analysis is structured in three parts: First, fixed-effects regressions assess the average effect of 20 major epidemics on FDI, revealing that diseases such as Ebola, MERS, Lassa Fever, and Leptospirosis significantly reduce investment inflows. Second, local projection methods trace the short-and medium-term responses of FDI to health shocks by transmission type. The results show varying recovery patterns: while FDI tends to rebound after direct contact or mosquito-borne outbreaks, airborne diseases cause more persistent declines. Third, the study explores whether stronger healthcare systems can mitigate these negative effects. Results suggest that countries with a higher density of nurses experience less severe FDI losses during outbreaks, particularly for diseases transmitted through direct contact or bodily fluids. These findings underline the importance of healthcare investment not only for public health but also for economic resilience. By distinguishing effects across disease types and highlighting the moderating role of health infrastructure, this study offers practical insights for policymakers seeking to safeguard investment flows during times of crisis.

This paper studies whether profile-based explanations influence investors' acceptance of algorithmic risk recommendations in a randomized controlled trial embedded directly in the platform's interface of a leading French robo-advisor. Users were assigned either to see graphical explanations of the drivers underlying their recommended risk score and associated portfolio or to receive the standard interface with no explanation. Our results, obtained in a real-world setting with actual clients of a FinTech, do not support the adherence gains from increased transparency that are widely anticipated in the literature. Overall, providing profile-based explanations is not found to increase acceptance of the recommended profile nor raise users' engagement with the platform. However, we find a heterogeneous treatment effect as profilebased explanations lead to a greater downward deviation among desktop users who have already deviated to safer-than-recommended portfolios, but this pattern disappears once users' experience of the platform is taken into account. We observe non-causal evidence in both conditions that behavior is shaped primarily by the digital context and experience: phone and first-time users are more likely to accept the portfolio recommendation than desktop and returning users. While such transparency-enhancing profile-based explanations are informative, they are not a universal lever for adherence, suggesting that explanation design should be tested and tailored across device types and users' experience.

The Digital Services Act and the AI Act adopted by European institutions require algorithmic decisionmaking systems to meet transparency obligations through the provision of explanations of their functioning. As algorithmic decision-making systems increasingly shape individuals' economic and social lives, this paper experimentally tests whether adding a non-technical explanation to a neutral system description affects public acceptance. The study relies on a large-scale survey experiment on nationally representative adult samples in France, Germany, and Italy in which each respondent evaluates six algorithmic and AI systems spanning finance, health, public services, employment, online commerce, and digital media. We measure the economically relevant dimensions of adoption and legitimacy, including beliefs, evaluative attitudes, and willingness to delegate decisions. Explanations yield measurable, though modest, increases in willingness to delegate. A mechanism-consistent decomposition shows that these effects arise primarily through improved attitudes toward the systems, while direct effects and belief shifts play a secondary role. Overall, explanations reliably move acceptance in the intended direction, but do not eliminate persistent concerns, especially those related to privacy. The results highlight both the promise and limits of information disclosure as a regulatory tool.

Practical Applications Market Perspectives Top Picks Experts Submit an article More Sustainable Multi-Manager Portfolio Optimization under Factor Model Uncertainty Benoit BegocChristophe BoucherPatrick KouontchouSessi Tokpavi The Journal of Portfolio Management Factor-Based Investing 2026, 52 ( 3) 255 - 279 DOI: 10.3905/jpm.2025.1.790 To download content, you need to upgrade your trial to full subscription. Please contact your account manager to do this. Please log-in to or register for your personal account in order to save a bookmark. Log-in/register Please log-in to or register for your personal account in order to apply a label. Log-in/register You must be logged in as an individual apply an alert. Log-in/register The Journal of Portfolio Management Vol 52 Issue 3 The Journal of Portfolio Management Vol 52 Issue 3 Volume 52, Issue 3 Factor-Based Investing 2026 Download issue PDF To download content, you need to upgrade your trial to full subscription. Please contact your account manager to do this. lock Log in to access this content or Request a Demo Request a Demo Find topics, articles or authors... Article Authors Abstract Beyond environmental and ethical objectives, the performance of sustainable funds has been shown to vary significantly over time due to their exposure to identifiable investment factors such as growth and quality. The authors introduce a straightforward allocation method of sustainable funds that smooths performance over market cycles by capping unwanted style risks and boosting genuine outperformance (alpha). This is accomplished through an empirical strategy that accounts for uncertainty in factor models when estimating fund sensitivities and abnormal returns, combined with an optimization program that requires no tuning parameters and limits portfolio rebalancing. Empirical applications to a European universe—including Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation Articles 8 and 9 environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds—demonstrate that the proposed active strategy outperforms many widely used passive ESG indexes, as well as competing active and smart beta approaches. These results also hold over an extended universe of both sustainable and nonsustainable funds, underscoring the robustness of the methodology.

The choice of cooking fuel is a critical economic and health decision for rural households, with significant implications for well-being and environmental sustainability. This paper examines whether rural non-farm entrepreneurship promotes the adoption of cleaner cooking fuels, specifically liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). Using large, nationally representative data from eight WAEMU countries – Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo – we apply econometric techniques to address endogeneity and selection bias. Our findings show that households engaged in non-farm entrepreneurial activities are significantly more likely to adopt LPG. We further show that non-farm entrepreneurship enhances financial inclusion by improving access to microfinance, mobile banking, and informal savings groups (ROSCAs), thereby easing liquidity constraints that limit investments in clean energy. These results suggest that promoting rural non-farm enterprises, along with expanding financial services and infrastructure, can effectively reduce energy poverty and improve health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa.