Omar Vásquez Duque

Many asset managers have stopped offering funds supporting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals in the face of political backlash. In new research, Omar Vasquez Duque shows that much of this backlash is due to semantics and poor fund design, and that investors across the political spectrum are willing to take lower financial returns to support specific goals under the ESG label.

Recent antitrust interventions have put forward behaviorally informed theories of harm. However, they have adopted a deterministic model of behavior, missing the nuances that allow behavioral economics to provide a richer picture of people’s conduct. The recently concluded Google trial, grounded on the stickiness of defaults, is a good example. A more careful application of behavioral economics would have shown how Google’s purchase of default search engine status was a part of a broader monopolization plan. It would also show why the dominant remedy, forced choice, would have negligible effects.