Good morning and good afternoon, everyone, depending on where you are in the world.

My name is Frederick Erickson.

And today on the Global Economy podcast, I am welcoming my colleague again,

Oscar Ginnia. Hello, Oscar. Hi, hello, Frederick. Happy to be here again. I'm all right.

How are you, Oscar? I'm all right. Thanks. Very good. So we are today going to talk about a paper

that both you and I have been involved in.

And it's a paper where you've been the lead economists and been in charge of a pretty large research team that have been working for quite a while in order to get into the depth of the reality of something which is very, very rarely talked about in Europe,

and that is collective litigation or mass litigation, what sometimes is called class action when we use the American term for it. And to the extent people will know about it,

it probably will be an import from the United States. We've all seen movies like Aaron Brokovich,

how you can have a private enforcement system where you actually go to court in order to get what is usually called collective redress, meaning that you have a large group of people who joined together to make a claim against a company for having violated a regulation.

Now, we have done a study which is looking at Europe and looking at developments in Europe.

And I wanted to start our conversation, Oscar, and sort of center around a bit.

Why is this important to look at from a European angle?

Why do you think people should care about mass litigation or collective litigation in Europe?

Well, it is important for several reasons.

Let's start unpacking them.

The first one is that mass litigation,

collective action, it is an additional cost to private companies.

It's the cost of the settlements that they might have to pay,

is the cost of the insurance they might have to buy in order to protect themselves in case of

a lawsuit, and it's the cost of uncertainty that it brings to companies. And we can talk about

this later on.

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