In recent decades, the financial markets have experienced various crises, shocks and disruptive events, driving high levels of volatility. This volatility is too strong to be fully justified simply by changes in fundamentals. This volume discusses these highly relevant issues with special focus on asset pricing and behavioral finance. Financial price assets of the 2020s appear to be driven by various attractors in addition to fundamentals, and there is no doubt that investor emotions, market sentiment, the news, and external factors such as uncertainty all play a key role. This has been clearly observed in recent years, especially during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has changed the common perception of the way financial markets work.

Rethinking Finance in the Face of New Challenges provides an overview of the new research perspectives devoted to financial activity, reconsidering the opposition between orthodox and heterodox schools of finance. The purpose is to identify new theoretical and practical issues around the concepts of values, radical uncertainty, and financial instability, but also to examine the consequences of the financialisation process on the dynamics of organisations and markets, as well as on value production mechanisms. This fifteenth volume of Critical Studies on Corporate Responsibility, Governance and Sustainability begins by exploring the globalisation and financialisation of economies, central banks and corporate strategies before switching to focus on financial value as a historically situated social construct. The book then examines the relationship between finance, social value and sustainable development and presents several avenues for reflection with a view to a paradigmatic renewal of research and teaching in finance. At a time when an unprecedented infectious and sanitary crisis is generating disastrous financial, economic, social and societal repercussions, the work presented in this book will stimulate reflection and contribute to the renewal of a Finance that now has to face many new social, societal and environmental challenges.