MacroFinance, Sustainability, and Ethics Group

Macrofinancial structure is the web of balance sheets that spans the economic system. It envelops public actors (governments, central banks, supranational bodies), market actors and other (semi-public/ngo) organizations. It is shaped by the rules and institutions that govern their actions and options.

Financial crises, Covid, climate change and war have spurred renewed attention to society’s macrofinancial organization to meet today's challenges. During the 2007/8 financial crisis and again during the global pandemic of 2020-2022, the global macrofinancial system -coordinated by the central banks and government in the world’s financial centres - rapidly mobilized the billions of financial liquidity needed to stabilize economies. But it is much harder to create sufficient financial infrastructure to confront the ecological crisis, to solve the developing economies’ looming debt crisis, and to redress the growth of inequality in wealth and incomes.

In the MacroFinance, Sustainability and Ethics (MSE) Group we ask: what is the role of macrofinancial structure in addressing today's challenges around the green transition,economic inequality and innovation? What ethical questions are pertinent in the relation between finance and sustainable prosperity?

For instance, the MSE group will address questions around the psychology, ethics and regulation of sustainable finance. We focus on the question: what duty do financial firms have to know the impacts of their investment, in relation to their capabilities, linking to the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD).

We also work on a project on private finance in the climate transition from ethical,economic, and legal perspectives. Here a consensus has developed that mobilizing finance is key to the transition, and that the private financial sector should take the lead in mobilizing and directing finance, provided that necessary conditions are met by the public sector in terms of level-playing-field setting and de-risking climate asset markets. The aim of the project is to scrutinize this consensus critically and constructively from an interdisciplinary perspective, starting from a shared set of five assumptions and addressing five concrete themes.

The ambition is to extend the MSE group into an international network.