Preliminary Conference Programme

Corporations increasingly use investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) to challenge foreign regulations through international arbitration, raising concerns about corporate influence over government policymaking. Using comprehensive data on 1,023 ISDS cases, we document three findings. First, publicly traded firms are significantly more likely than private firms to challenge industry-wide foreign regulations, while showing no differential propensity to challenge firm-specific rules. This pattern is consistent with public firms having larger industry stakes that reduce free-riding incentives. Second, industry-wide challenges filed by public firms take approximately 1.9 years longer to resolve. This difference persists under identical investment treaties, a pattern more consistent with regulatory delays than case complexity. Third, cross-sectional tests reveal these patterns are strongest in countries with strong shareholder protections and for regulations protecting foreign stakeholders. Stock markets respond positively to ISDS filings, particularly for challenges targeting stakeholder-protective regulations. Our findings suggest public firms use ISDS in ways that prioritize domestic shareholder interests over foreign stakeholder welfare.

This paper shows how corporate net-zero has become a contested political arena rather than a neutral process of technological substitution. Based on qualitative analysis of 295 think tank public interventions and nearly 15 hours of media output from 20 progressive, centrist, and conservative think tanks (2020–2025), we demonstrate that struggles over decarbonization increasingly revolve around competing socio-technical imaginaries that authorize divergent futures. We introduce the concept of imaginary fragmentation to explain how net-zero governance is shaped not by convergence on shared expectations, but by antagonistic visions grounded in incompatible epistemic claims, temporal horizons, and governance logics. These imaginaries gain coherence through opposition and are stabilized through three mechanisms: moralized epistemics, politicized temporalities, and governance framings that embed preferred futures in institutional infrastructures. We argue that such fragmentation shifts net-zero governance from disputes over policy tools to conflicts over which futures are legitimate, feasible, and morally defensible, contributing to literature by theorizing future-making as contested institutional work and highlighting think tanks as powerful infomediaries shaping corporate net-zero commitments.

A growing political backlash against sustainable investing has prompted many U.S. states to enact anti-ESG laws restricting public funds from considering ESG factors. We examine how such legislation in implementing states shapes the ESG practices of firms headquartered elsewhere through ownership networks of state pension funds. We find firms with greater exposure to affected pensions experience significant declines in ESG performance, even when headquartered outside the enacting states. These declines arise through both exit and voice channels, and are more pronounced in Republican-leaning states. Financial markets respond asymmetrically: low-ESG firms earn positive announcement-window returns, whereas high-ESG firms show muted reactions. Treated firms also report modest improvements in accounting performance. Overall, our evidence shows that anti-ESG policies can propagate across state borders through capital market linkages.