The dominant neoliberal policy community holds that a reduction in employment rights and social protection is likely to promote economic recovery and growth. It has been suggested that investors are likely to shun countries where such rights are strong; in contrast, radical labour market deregulation is seen as encouraging both local business and multinationals to invest. This study explores whether labour market deregulation in South-Eastern Europe has really encouraged multinationals to invest in the region. We find that the weakening of important aspects of employment rights under the law appears to detract from, rather than encourage, foreign direct investment (FDI). We also show that stronger employment rights are more likely to attract FDI when the host country is located within the European Union. This finding suggests that the complementarities associated with stronger employment rights and more committed labour may offset the overall deterrent effects of the greater regulation associated with EU membership.

An emerging body of literature connects the well-known Varieties of Capitalism framework (and its variants) with the propensity of nations to move away from hydrocarbons. Our study extends this work by exploring how macro-level institutional configurations matter for public expectations towards corporate environmental sustainability practices. By linking survey data of public-as-stakeholders to institutional systems encompassing 16 countries (N = 7156), we use multi-level modelling to test the explanatory power of a theoretically well-refined recent construct, namely, the Varieties of Institutional Systems - and discover significant variations associated with public expectations across different institutional systems. The findings, however, defy the notion of a clear distinction between mature and emerging markets or that mature institutional systems consistently hold firms to higher environmental standards. Rather surprisingly and counter-intuitively, we find that public-as-stakeholders from State-Led institutional systems had the highest expectations towards corporate environmental sustainability practices. We outline some of the major theoretical and policy implications of our research findings.

One of the critical risks associated with cryptocurrency assets is the so‐called downside risk, or tail risk. Conditional Value‐at‐Risk (CVaR) is a measure of tail risks that is not normally considered in the construction of a cryptocurrency portfolio. In this paper, we propose a new approach to portfolio construction based on a deep learning CVaR utility function. This approach is designed to address the issue of tail risk. We evaluate the performance of this approach in comparison to other portfolio construction techniques, including the naïve, minimum variance and mean‐variance portfolios. Our findings indicate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional optimisation models.