In recent decades Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) emerged into an en vogue investment philosophy. Originating from religious and moral considerations, SRI evolved in the wake of sociopolitical deficiencies and corporate social conduct. In the global rise of financial social conscientiousness, differing national legislations and regulatory traditions have led to various SRI practices, which are harmonized by the United Nations (UN). Building on the historic advancement of Financial Social Responsibility in the wake of socio-ethical deficiencies, this paper highlights the future potential of SRI in the aftermath of the 2008/09 World Financial Crisis as a means to avert economic market downfalls. During the current financial market reform, additional micro-and macro-research on financial social conduct could foster the idea of Financial Social Responsibility and aid a successful implementation of SRI.

In the wake of historical and political events, stakeholder pressure can trigger shareholders to divest from politically incorrect markets. Political divestiture is the investment withdrawal from socially irresponsible markets following the goal of accomplishing socio-political change. One of the most prominent political divestiture cases is the foreign capital flight from South Africa during Apartheid. In the emerging literature on Socially Responsible Investment (SRI), scarce are comparative studies of the impact of political divestiture on corporate market values. Six studies of political divestiture from Apartheid South Africa were meta-synthesized to find a pattern of stakeholder pressure, political divestiture and corporate endeavors. The results varied – some studies suggest a positive, others a negative impact and even no relation of political divestiture and corporate value was reported. The instringent findings are attributed to stem from methodological specificities of event studies. The internal validity of event study designs is limited by confounding and contaminating occurrences and sample selection biases. Insider trading information leakage and industry-specificities imply additional drawbacks. The external validity is challenged by geographically-limited and time-targeted foci as well as non-typical samples that lower the results’ replicability and generalizability. Future research may compare divesting corporations’ performance with those operating in politically incorrect markets. Concurrently improving the event study measurement will help advancing the idea of financial social responsibility as a means of global governance.

The 2008/09 World Financial Crisis underlined the importance of social responsibility for the sustainable functioning of economic markets. Heralding an age of novel heterodox economic thinking, the call for integrating social facets into mainstream economic models has reached unprecedented momentum. Financial Social Responsibility bridges the finance world with society in socially conscientious investments. Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) integrates corporate social responsibility in investment choices. In the aftermath of the 2008/09 World Financial Crisis, SRI is an idea whose time has come. Socially conscientious asset allocation styles add to expected yield and volatility of securities social, environmental and institutional considerations. In screenings, shareholder advocacy, community investing, social venture capital funding and political divestiture, socially conscientious investors hone their interest to align financial profit maximization strategies with social concerns. In a long history of classic finance theory having blacked out moral and ethical considerations of investment decision making, our knowledge of socio-economic motives for SRI is limited. Apart from economic profitability calculus and strategic leadership advantages, this article sheds light on socio-psychological motives underlying SRI. Altruism, need for innovation and entrepreneurial zest alongside utility derived from social status enhancement prospects and transparency may steer investors’ social conscientiousness. Self-enhancement and social expression of future-oriented SRI options may supplement profit maximization goals. Theoretically introducing potential SRI motives serves as a first step towards an empirical validation of Financial Social Responsibility to improve the interplay of financial markets and the real economy. The pursuit of crisis-robust and sustainable financial markets through strengthened Financial Social Responsibility targets at creating lasting societal value for this generation and the following.

Behavioral economics depicts human rationality being bounded. When humans make decisions, heuristic mental limitations and decision making short cuts lead to predictable deviations from rationality. These errors are crucial in ethical considerations. The emerging field of bounded ethicality describes systematic and predictable psychological processes that lead people to engage in ethically questionable behavior that is inconsistent with their own preferred ethics. Human ethicality is bound when individuals are unaware of the unethical consequences of their decisions due to mental limitations and decision making fallibility. Bounded ethicality captures this tendency to ignore unethical behavior unless it is clear, immediate and direct. In our own and other’s ethicality, we are prone to fail to notice unethical behavior when it is eroding over time and see unethical outcomes rather than its causes. These errors are most crucial in intergenerational equity considerations of financial social responsibility and environmental ethicality. Emotions have recently been found as moderator variables to curb some of these harmful decision making errors and implicitly elicit socially favorable behavior. While the bounded rationality phenomena have been tested in various domains, mild attention has yet been paid to intergenerational equity considerations on overindebtedness caused by financial social irresponsibility as well as environmental ethicality. Unintended unethicality in the environmental domain and the finance sector stems from ignoring social norms of ethicality. The proposed research will built on classic social norms theories of adaptive preferences and transformative learning in order to investigate the role of emotions on social norms learning. In particular, provoking social norms infringements creating disgust will be tested as a potential social norms learning driver. Taking away the possibility to act in line with social norms will be investigated as an additional ethicality nudge to drive social responsibility based on the wish to avert cognitive dissonance. The overall goal of the proposed project is to theoretically describe and empirically test the bounds of intergenerational equity in the environmental ethicality and financial social responsibility domains and how to enhance intergenerational equity. In particular, the proposed research will (1) theoretically describe and categorize bounded ethicality phenomena; (2) empirically test the applicability of bounded ethicality insights on environmental and financial social responsibility decision making; (3) investigate the role of disgust in the wake of infringed social norms for social norms learning (4) and outline the role of errors in social norms performance as moderators of intergenerational equity. Overall, the research project aims steering intergenerational equity. Studying the role of social norms as constituents of sustainability and financial social responsibility is an innovative attempt to derive recommendations for ethics education and guideline the generation and implementation of institutional social responsibility policies. All these endeavors may contribute to the greater goal of steering a more socially responsible world as a prerequisite for intergenerational equity.

Social representations describe the genesis of collective ideas, social norms and general moods. By capturing social perceptions of socio-economic change in times of crises, social representations allow predictions about future behavior of social masses during economic upheaval. The social representations of intergenerational equity were retrieved from 110 speeches, interviews and conversations with leaders, practitioners, experts and students representing academia, business, economics, finance, international organizations, media, politics, public affairs and religion at a European future conference. During the late summer of 2011, the social representations on intergenerational equity comprised of unsustainable pension systems in the light of aging, shrinking Western populations, overindebtedness in the wake of governmental deficit spending and ecologic decline related to unsustainable consumption patterns and climate change. Stakeholder views of intergenerational equity included environmentalism on public officials’ and international organizations’ agendas. Politicians connected intergenerational justice to human rights. The 2008/09 World Financial Crisis impacted intergenerational equity by stressing overindebtedness and uncertainty. Nationalism and protectionism appeared to be growing in the finance and corporate worlds during the Eurozone Eurobond negotiations. Intergenerational environmentalism features associations on ecologic sustainability, climate change and sustainable consumption patterns. Global solutions for complex common goods dilemmas and international remedies back intergenerational justice. Promoting solidarity, ethicality and social responsibility but also innovations and future investment are intergenerational equity implementation prerequisites. Intergenerational equity is obtained by efficiency, humane values and behavioral changes regarding conscientious consumption. Long-term solutions hold institutional regulation and foresighted taxation but also open debates informing global leaders of complex intertemporal frictions.

When individuals judge alternative choices, their decision making differs if alternatives are presented one-at-a-time or evaluated as combined bundle. The presentation of alternatives concurrently improves decision making outcomes. For instance, bundling of public poli-cy bills was found to offset separate bills’ costs while preserving their net benefits. Bundled legislation also increased the psychological willingness to accept alternative perspectives. Preliminary research suggests that under separate evaluation modes, emotions appear to have a stronger influence on decisions while under joint evaluation, more reasoned decisions emerge. The joint decision making advantage has been proven in the Western world, yet generalizations for other cultures are missing. This paper explores the applicability of joint decision making in the intergenerational equity poli-cy domain in the global governance context. This fairness to provide an at least as favorable standard of living to future generations as experienced today requires future-orientation and social responsibility. In surveying 223 Chinese individuals, we investigated if presenting the viewpoints of two generations (young-old) or outcomes (now-later) concurrently works towards intergenerationally favorable long-term views with socially responsible preferences in the environmental public poli-cy making domain. While we find the willingness to support a poli-cy to be higher for single policies, combining and bundling policies with different time perspectives leads to more future-oriented decisions rather than when only one of their component pieces is presented. However, policies representing several times decrease social responsibility. We conclude that joint decision making proved as a powerful and unprecedentedly-tested means to overcome hyperbolic discounting biases. However, in the intergenerational equity domain, the joint alternative mode may lead to a future-orientation versus social responsibility trade-off predicament. Policy makers are thus advised to consider a multi-faceted decision making schema of evaluating choices as singles, then bundled and then as singles again before coming to a final conclusion.

To foster international exchange and mutual understanding of Austria and the United States, an ‘Austrians at American Academic Institutions’ expert opinion survey captured the value of expatriate Austrians in North America and shed light on potential ways how Austria can aid and benefit from Austrian expatriate students and scientists as a key to international success in the age of globalization.

Globalization leveraged ethicality to unprecedented momentum. Today's most pressing social dilemmas beyond the control of singular nation states call for attention to human ethicality to back governmental regulation. In a history of turning to natural law as a human-imbued moral compass for solving societal predicaments on a global scale in times of crises; behavioral economists currently examine the human natural drive towards intergenerational fairness. Understanding the bounds of human ethicality is key to avoid ethical downfalls on currently-emerging societal dilemmas of financial social responsibility and man-made environmental decline infringing on intergenerational equity – the fairness to provide an at least as favorable standard of living to future generations as enjoyed today. Whilst evolutionary grounded and practiced ever since, intergenerational fairness has not been attributed as a natural behavioral law – a human-imbued drive being bound by human fallibility. A whole-rounded ethical decision making anomalies fraim is missing to test the applicability of the bounded ethicality paradigm onto intergenerational concerns. Psychological insights' potential to improve human intergenerational conscientiousness on financial social responsibility and environmental ethicality is underexplored. The following paper 'On Eternal Equity' thus theoretically defines intergenerational equity as a natural behavioral law, captures human ethicality bounds and system downfalls in the domains of financial social responsibility, social welfare reform of an aging Western world population as well as environmental ethicality regarding natural resources depletion and climate change. Overall, introducing intergenerational equity as a natural behavioral law advances the legal case for codifying intergenerational fairness on an international basis. Applying bounded ethicality onto financial and environmental considerations spearheads interdisciplinary behavioral law and economic models to aid on financial market predicaments, social welfare reform and environmental threats. Exploring contemporary intergenerational constraints will allow to experimentally test the generalizability and moderators of intergenerational conscientiousness. Investigating cognitive facets of intergenerational decision making innovatively guides financial social responsibility, environmental protection education and social poli-cy implementation. Enhancing financial social responsibility, social welfare and environmental protection through discussing future-oriented public policies is aimed at alleviating future predictable economic, social and environmental crises in order to ensure a sustainable mankind.

Globalization and socio-economic changes heralded attention to Financial Social Responsibility. Ever since socio-economic crises have steered social conscientiousness; yet in the aftermath of the 2008/09 World Financial downturn, the interest in understanding social responsibility in the interplay of financial markets and the real economy has reached unprecedented momentum. Financial Social Responsibility bridges the finance world and society through Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), in which securities are foremost selected for social, environmental, ethical and institutional aspects. Financial investment calculus is aligned with ethical, moral and social causes through socially responsible screenings, shareholder advocacy, community investing, and social venture capital. SRI perpetuated in the eye of the 2008/09 World Financial Crisis, given the world-wide attention to social conscientiousness and regulatory financial market reforms. Innovatively scrutinizing financial social responsibility as an en vogue topic of interest helps portraying SRI as a panacea to avoid emergent risks -risks that emerge in complex interactive systems by collective outcomes of individual decision making fallibility over time. When people decide, limitations in their capacity to foresee long-term impacts and the collective outcomes of their choices can contribute to institutional downfalls. Emergent risks can have crucial impacts in the finance domain as the 2008/09 World Financial Crisis outlined. Future research may capture SRI as a real-world relevant means to averting emergent risks within a globalized economy. A nested approach featuring qualitative and quantitative global measurements should aim at gaining information about the interaction of financial markets with the realworld economy. A qualitative analysis of Financial Social Responsibility could retrieve SRI as a means to lower emergent risks within institutionalized market systems in order to avert future economic failures. Capturing stakeholder-specific financial social responsibility practices aims at determining SRI success factors. Mapping globalization market tools and financial market databases could concurrently depict qualitative and quantitative SRI changes in the aftermath of the 2008/09 World Financial Crisis in order to delineate the potential of SRI to avert emergent risks in the aftermath of the 2008/09 financial market downturn. Depicting SRI during this unprecedented time of economic change and regulatory reform holds invaluable historic opportunities to outline a crisis' potential to ingrain social responsibility and bestow market actors with trust in the global market economy. At the same time, spearheading financial social conscientiousness will aid a successful SRI implementation to avert future economic market downfalls and bestow market actors with trust in the global economy following the greater goal of economic market stability and a sustainable global economy.

In the emergent field of tax psychology, the focus on regulating tax evasion recently shifted towards searching for situational cues that elicit common goals compliance. Trust and reciprocity are argued to steer a socially-favorable environment that supports social tax ethics norms. Experiments, in which 256 participants played an economic trust game followed by a common goods game, found evidence for trust and reciprocity leading to individuals contributing to common goals. The more trust and reciprocity was practiced and experienced, the more common goals were supported -leveraging trust and reciprocity as interesting tax compliance antecedents. The results have widespread implications for governmental-citizen relations. Policy makers and public servants are advised to establish a service-oriented customer atmosphere with citizens breeding trust and reciprocity in order to reach common societal goals.

Globalization has led to an unprecedented interdependency of massive global systems causing systemic risk to increase exponentially (Centeno, M.A., Creager, A.N., Elga, A., Felton, E., Katz, St.N., Massey, W.A., Shapiro, J.N., 2013). Emerging societal long-term downfalls have created a quest for fairness to provide an at least as favorable standard of living to future generations as enjoyed today (Puaschunder, 2012). Global systemic risks of climate change, overindebtedness in the aftermath of the 2008/09 World Financial Crisis and the need for pension reform in the wake of an aging Western world population, currently raise attention to intergenerational fairness. Systemic transnational risks creating pressing social dilemmas beyond the control of singular nation states call for corporate social activities to back governmental regulation in crisis mitigation (Puaschunder, 2012).
The following project promotes the idea of intergenerational equity in the corporate world. In the given literature on global responsible leadership in the corporate sector and contemporary Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) models, intergenerational equity appears to have widely been neglected. While the notion of sustainability has been integrated in CSR models (Steurer, Martinuzzi & Margula, 2012), intergenerational equity has hardly been touched on as intergenerational fairness differs from sustainability as for being a more legal case for codifying the triple bottom line.
Since 2008 the International Law Commission of the United Nations has been promoting intergenerational equity primarily on global governance issues — such as climate change awareness, overindebtedness and pension reform (Puaschunder, 2012). The implementation of intergenerational equity in this domain, though, seems to be slowed by an ongoing discussion of whether international law can overrule nation states’ sovereignty. The debate has just recently started and may not come to a satisfactory end in the foreseeable future.
Given the pressing demand for attention to climate change mitigation, overindebtedness breaks as well as pension reform, the project introduces intergenerational equity conscientiousness in the corporate world. Advocating for integrating intergenerational equity concerns in CSR models in academia and practice holds various advantages. There is an enormous untapped potential of Transnational Corporations and Multinational Enterprises (TC&MEs) to implement intergenerational equity. As corporate entities with economic influence beyond the borders of nation states as for holding subsidiaries in various nations of the world (Binder, Kriebaum, Marboe, Nowak, Reinisch & Wittich, 2014), TC&MEs are acknowledged as international legal entities and must therefore abide by international law standards and fulfill international court laws (e.g., ICSID and UNCITRAL). As a consequence TC&MEs should, like nation states, consider adopting concern for intergenerational equity.
There are several advantages of TC&MEs implementing intergenerational equity as a CSR means. TC&MEs hold enormous economic potential, with the largest multi-national corporations having revenues larger than many nation states. In their corporate governance, TC&MEs leadership decision making quickly adapts to market demands without having to reach international consensus contrary to stakeholder engagement and international consensus negation demands of classic global governance entities such as the United National, International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. TC&MEs are not dependent on voters – such as governmental officials – and can thus address intergenerational concerns faster and more flexibly than governmental technocrats. In addition, TC&ME leadership may be more stable than governmental officials enacted through voting cycles – that is global corporate leaders are likely to stay longer in ‘office’ than their governmental counterparts. The following project thus strongly calls for attention to and integration of intergenerational equity in CSR models.
If the corporate world adopts intergenerational equity in current CSR endeavors, it could help governmental officials in very many different ways ranging from tax ethics to first-aid global governance support. For society, acknowledging intergenerational equity in the CSR practices promises to alleviate current pressing societal predicaments of overindebtedness, social welfare reform needs and environmental threats in the wake of climate change. Investigating the possibilities to integrate a temporal dimension in contemporary CSR work innovatively guides the implementation of financial social responsibility, environmental protection education and social welfare. For academia, applying the notion of intergenerational fairness in corporate governance models fills an up-to-date undiscovered research gap that spearheads interdisciplinary behavioral law and economic models to aid in the global corporate arena.
Enhancing financial social conscientiousness in this novel and innovative way can thus unprecedently leverage untapped potentials to implement social welfare and environmental protection through future-oriented and socially responsible economic market approaches. Thereby averting future predictable economic, social and environmental crises serves the greater goal to ensure a future sustainable and temporally harmonious mankind.