Nathaniel Lane

Human Rights Abuses and Financial Fortunes of Linked Companies

In a recent working paper, Nathan Lane and his co-authors, David Kreitmeir and Paul Raschky, assessed how the killings of mining activists affected the financial fortunes of companies associated with those murders. The research suggests that the association with flagrant human rights violations in the press or in human rights reports alone has a significant negative impact on the company’s stock market value, even when there is no legal action. The paper concludes, “Our findings show that informational campaigns by civil society have in fact an impact on multinational corporations and being linked to human rights abuses can significantly influence an associated companies’ stock market value.”

Mr. Lane’s interests are at the intersection of industrial development, political economy, comparative historical development, and big data. His current research agenda is focused on establishing fundamental facts around industrial policy. This empirical work is focused on understanding the efficacy, determinants, and patterns of these controversial policies. His work has been featured in The Economist, The Financial Times, Trade Talks, among others. Together with his Industrial Policy Group, Mr. Lane’s agenda aims to make industrial strategy an object of inquiry within economics. His most recent projects 1) quantify the patterns of global policy practice using mass textual data on commercial policy, and 2) unpack the efficacy of East Asian export promotion policies.

Nathan Lane is Associate Professor in Economics at Oxford University and co-founder of the Industrial Policy Group, with Réka Juhasz of the University of British Columbia. Currently, he is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and a Research Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Prior to Oxford, Mr. Lane was an Economics Professor at Monash University, where he was cofounder of SodaLabs.io. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.