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The Recast Energy Efficiency Directive 2023 has defined the concept of “split incentive,” also known as “tenant-owner dilemma.” This dilemma refers to the situation where neither landlords nor tenants have incentives to invest in energy efficiency upgrades. Although the Energy Efficiency Directive calls Member States to overcome legal barriers to remove split incentives and to encourage retrofits, the list of possible measures is too vague. This paper aims to discuss tenancy law measures designed to increase the energy efficiency of residential housing and to detect which Member States have already addressed this phenomenon.

This paper analyses, from a civil legal perspective, the possible private law barriers arising from the tenant-owner dilemma when performing energy efficiency works in selected countries and proposes legal reforms in tenancy law and related policies to overcome them. To do so, this paper follows a legal-dogmatic and comparative law methodology.

This paper concludes that some tenancy law provisions, such as the possibility to increase the rent after energy efficiency renovations and long-term leases, may challenge the tenant-owner dilemma in private rented markets, thus promoting renovations and retrofitting for energy efficiency purposes. It also proposes other policies intended to increase parties’ willingness to undertake works.

More research on the economic and legal efficiency to regulate some of the civil law measures to challenge the tenant-owner dilemma should be necessary.

The civil law measures included in this paper may help national policymakers meet the energy efficiency targets, according to what is established in the Recast Energy Efficiency Directive 2023.

Based on the economic theory of the tenant-owner dilemma, this paper investigates the elements of tenancy law that may contribute to less energy-efficient homes, proposing policies for those countries interested in addressing the energy-efficiency challenge from a private law point of view.

In the context of difficulties in access to housing, the Spanish Act 4/2013 introduced a new article 17.5 into the Act on Urban Leases 1994 (LAU). This paper regulates the so-called renovations in lieu of rent (rehabilitación por renta), that is to say, a tenancy contract in which the tenant does not pay the rent in money but by performing renovation works in the same rented dwelling. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the legal regime of renovations in lieu of rent and how this scheme works.

Renovations in lieu of rent, by its own nature, allow a tenant with building skills to access affordable housing. However, due to the new regulation of this tenancy contract, which is only included in Paragraph 5 of art. 17 LAU, some problems may arise from a legal perspective.

This paper approaches the compatibility of this scheme with the LAU, detects its problems and proposes legal improvements.

This paper explores the application of renovations in lieu of rent and determines whether this new scheme, according to the current regulation, may represent a true residential alternative for vulnerable people or if legislative reform is needed to promote its use.

Blockchain, which was originally created to enable peer-to-peer digital payment systems (bitcoin), is considered to have several benefits for different sectors, such as the real estate one. In a standard European-wide real estate transaction, several intermediaries are involved. As a consequence, these agreements are usually time-consuming and involve extra difficulties to cross-border operations. As blockchain, combined with smart contracts, may have an important role in these transactions, this paper aims to explore its prospective challenges, limitations and opportunities in the real estate sector and discover how the traditional intermediaries have to face a possible implementation of this technology.

This paper analyses the current intermediaries in the real estate sector in European Union (EU), their functions and how can blockchain strengthen the security of these transactions while reducing their time. The author uses a legal methodology to approach it.

Blockchain, combined with smart contracts, has both challenges and opportunities for the real estate sector. On the one hand, it may improve procedures, allow EU transactions and the interconnection between public administration. However, to not reduce parties rights, this blockchain should have some special features, such as the possibility of being amended.

This paper provides a valuable overview of all the intermediaries that could be affected by blockchain protocols. It is of interest of blockchain developers, public administrations and researchers who are working on blockchain and property conveyancing.

The global economic crisis and the housing bubble meltdown have had a significant impact on the Spanish property market. As a result, the homeownership–tenancy dichotomy has become a matter of discussion, and efforts are made to discover formulas that provide affordable, stable and flexible housing access. Taking this background into account, the Catalan lawmaker has implemented the so-called “intermediate tenures” (temporal ownership and shared ownership) into the Catalan Civil Code, which are conceived as a middle ground between ownership and renting. This paper aims to explores how these “intermediate tenures” work.

These tenures are conceived as a middle ground between ownership and renting and may be used for a variety of purposes. As the Catalan lawmaker has fragmented the right of ownership on the basis of English law, which is a great breakthrough regarding the long-standing conception of the right of ownership in continental legal systems, the paper explores how these “intermediate tenures” work, as regulated in Act 19/2015, in a comparative perspective.

The paper offers an overview of how these “intermediate tenures” are regulated and which are the problems arising from legislation and the potential uses.

As the temporal ownership confers on the titleholder the domain of an asset for a specifically defined period of time, it does not conform to the right of ownership as it is currently conceived in continental European legal systems, given that it is based on the English leasehold; shared ownership confers on the buyer a property share in the thing, entitling him to the full possession, use and exclusive enjoyment of the thing and to gradually acquire the remaining share. Both are based on the English shared ownership scheme and leasehold, and are legal transplants worth to be analysed.

Tokenization is a relatively new activity in digital finance. Tokenization, a process that creates a blockchain representation of the underlying instrument, can enhance the standard features and characteristics of assets and securities. Asset and security tokenization produces many benefits. These benefits include reducing issuance and trading costs, lessening dependency on intermediaries, facilitating more liquidity in markets, and providing greater transparency around an asset’s lifecycle for all parties involved. This chapter synthesizes the key characteristics, benefits, processes, tools, and techniques of tokenizing real-world assets. It also provides several examples of current asset-backed token applications to help understand the rapidly growing industry and analyzes future expectations of this new technology.

Smart manufacturing is the prime gripper for the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. Smart manufacturing systems (SMSs) largely determine how smart manufacturing evolves in technical and organizational dimensions and how it realizes values in products, production or services. SMSs are growing rapidly and receiving tons of attention from academic research and industrial practice. However, the development of SMSs is still in its fancy, and many issues wait to be identified and solved, such as single point failures, low transparency and ineffective resource sharing. Blockchain, an emerging technology deriving from Bitcoin, is competent to aid SMSs to conquer troubles due to its decentralization, traceability, trackability, disintermediation, auditability and etc. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the blockchain applications in SMSs, seek out the challenges faced by blockchain-enabled SMSs (BSMSs) and provide referable research directions and ideas.

A comprehensive literature review as a survey is conducted in this paper. The survey starts by introducing blockchain concepts, followed by the descriptions of a literature review method and the blockchain applications throughout the product life cycle in SMSs. Then, the key issues and challenges confronting BSMSs are discussed and some possible research directions are also proposed. It finally presents qualitative and quantitative descriptions of BSMSs, along with some conclusions and implications.

The findings of this paper present a deep understanding about the current status and challenges of blockchain adoption in SMSs. Furthermore, this paper provides a brand new thinking for future research.

This paper minutely analyzes the impacts that blockchain exerts on SMSs in view of the product life cycle, and proposes using the complexity science thinking to deal with BSMSs qualitatively and quantitatively, including tackling the current major problems BSMSs face. This research can serve as a foundation for future theoretical studies and enterprise practice.

Drawing on financial slack resources theory, stakeholder theory and signaling theory, the purpose of this study is to explore the two-way causality between liquidity and corporate social responsibility (CSR) by using the cash conversion cycle (CCC) as liquidity proxy and composite and individual CSR metrics.

The data were retrieved from the Thomson Reuters Eikon database covering the period between 2013 and 2019 and 20,016 firm-year observations affiliated with ten business sectors and 60 countries. The fixed-effects panel regression analysis is executed in the empirical part.

The results indicate that firms with greater liquidity proxied by shorter CCC engage with greater CSR initiatives. They also reveal that firms with greater liquidity proxied by CCC do not regard all the dimensions of environmental and social performance equivalently; they do discriminate them. In the environmental pillar, firms funnel their cash derived from shorter CCC toward eco-innovation and resource use, respectively, but not to emissions reduction. In the social pillar, higher liquidity fosters community and human rights dimensions, respectively, but not workforce and product quality. These outcomes are largely robust to alternative CSR measurement, alternative sampling and endogeneity concerns. The reverse causality confirmed that CSR promotes higher liquidity (shorter CCC). Thus, the bidirectional relationship between CSR and liquidity is confirmed.

Although the authors wanted to consider a longer study period, they were obliged to choose 2013 as the starting period because particularly CCC data together with environmental, social and governance (ESG) data were not available in the earlier years.

Among environmental indicators, fueling eco-innovation most with greater liquidity shows that firms make a strategic choice for their long-term growth and legitimacy. Besides, greater liquidity induces greater community development and more respect for human rights rather than investing in workforce and product quality. Although this might be an outcome of the realization of a deliberate strategy and good for the society, not investing in the workforce and product quality may impair the long-term survival and competitive position of the firm in the long-run in the marketplace. The implication of reverse causality is that customers purchase products and services of firms that do good for the ecology and the community and they pay faster to those companies.

This study highlights that liquidity management and CSR are closely interrelated confirming a chicken and egg story. Firms with better liquidity management are more likely to care environment and community. Besides, doing good for society pays back in the form of enhanced firm liquidity triggering customer sympathy.

This research provides new insight by examining the two-way causality of the relationship between CSR performance and liquidity, which helps highlight the impact of CSR performance on the company’s ability to manage its cash and the benefits of having high liquidity on enhancing the company’s concern about the society and environment.

The purpose of this paper is to identify business practices that may promote internal financing of growing SMEs. The authors expand the literature on entrepreneurial finance that reduces business practices to either financial management or bootstrapping, by exploring all management practices that may have an impact on liquidities. This study enriches the literature on business practices. This is an important consideration for managers of SMEs who intend to preserve their financial independence and their capacity to survive different crises.

The empirical study involved a sample of 235 growing Canadian SMEs. The sample was extracted from a private database using a questionnaire that covered a wide range of business practices. Variance testing of business practices between SMEs with a line of credit and those without (and lower overall debt) was supplemented by a logistic regression.

SMEs which make use of efficiency-promoting technology, carry out preventive maintenance and control their costs and turnover during their growth are more inclined to use less external financing.

This is the first study that associates business practices, beyond bootstrapping, with financing and which answers a critical question posed by SME executives on how to preserve their financial and decision-making autonomy through growth stages. In addition, the desire to retain control of the company does not compel the SME manager to limit the size of the company.