Omar Vásquez Duque

This project uses conjoint analysis to empirically assess whether pension plan participants in the U.S. prefer to maximize profits at all costs or support ESG principles, even at the expense of their future pensions. It explores the legislative assumptions that underpin the promotion or prohibition of ESG investments across Republican and Democratic-led states.

The findings reveal a general preference among participants for funds that limit investments in companies not pursuing social objectives, with notable differences in attitudes between Democrat and Republican respondents, especially concerning firearms and fossil fuels. However, this project finds bipartisan support for companies combating child labor and promoting fair wages and gender equality. The study also notes that framing social issues as "labor rights" can shift conservative preferences toward prioritizing profitability.

The research concludes that both blanket ESG mandates and bans may not reflect the diverse preferences of pension plan participants, suggesting a need for more tailored pension plans that align with individual ethical and social values. This involves breaking down ESG into its components to better match investments with participant preferences, highlighting the complexity of aligning state pension fund legislation with the varied preferences of the population.

Related publication:

• Vásquez Duque, Omar. Navigating the Crossroads of Finance and Politics: Assessing the Representativeness of ESG Pension Investment Legislation. Maryland Law Review, forthcoming.

Default applications are pervasive. Computers and operative systems come with preinstalled software and most applications include preconfigured settings. The user experience’s environment may affect the market penetration of computer software and applications. In fact, several antitrust cases have dealt with the potential exclusionary effect of default applications. While the behavioral economics literature has documented default effects in many different domains, law enforcers have usually assumed that default effects exist and that these effects have anticompetitive effects. This research project examines to what extent and under what conditions default effects arise in the search engines market. To this end, I run a survey experiment on Amazon Mechanical Turk in which I randomly assigned the participants to either an active choice or a default condition in which one of three different search engines was assigned as the default. Preliminary results suggest that a stickiness effect exists, but it is highly moderated by the perceived quality of the search engine.