Uniwersytet Warszawski otrzymał 1 531 000,00 PLN z Narodowej Agencji Wymiany Akademickiej (NAWA) na realizację projektu w ramach programu „PROM – krótkookresowa wymiana akademicka". Kierownikiem projektu jest prof. ucz. dr hab. Piotr Grzebyk, prodziekan ds. badań naukowych i współpracy międzynarodowej. Wydział Prawa i Administracji UW będzie koordynatorem działań w ramach projektu
Research question and goal
The project is focused on addressing the growing issue of financial exclusion among the elderly, specifically in the context of rapidly advancing digitalization in financial services. As financial institutions increasingly shift their services online, the elderly, who often face
challenges related to digital literacy, cognitive decline, and access to technology, are at risk of being marginalized. The project aims to explore the impact of this digital shift on older people’s ability to access financial services, such as making payments for goods and services, which is critical to their independence and well-being.
The project is responding to a clear gap in the current research landscape. Most existing studies on financial inclusion treat consumers as a homogenous group, without accounting for the specific needs of different demographics, particularly the elderly. This is problematic because the elderly face unique challenges when it comes to engaging with digital financial services. These challenges include lower levels of financial literacy, difficulties in adapting to new technologies, and cognitive impairments that increase with age. As a result, the elderly are often excluded from accessing essential financial services, which undermines their ability to live independently and participate fully in society.
The existing legal research on financial inclusion tends to focus on consumers who are already digitally engaged, neglecting those who are involuntarily excluded due to barriers like digital illiteracy or lack of access to technology. Furthermore, there is a need for a more interdisciplinary approach that combines legal, sociological, and economic perspectives to better understand the implications of digital exclusion. This project seeks to address this gap by focusing specifically on the elderly and proposing legal reforms that would ensure their inclusion in the digital financial ecosystem.
The project’s ultimate goal is to develop a regulatory roadmap that can help ensure that older adults are not left behind in this transition. This roadmap will address the legal, economic, and social aspects of digital exclusion, proposing specific regulatory
frameworks that can help combat financial exclusion and promote inclusivity in the financial sector. It will assess the potential for public and private law interventions, focusing on how regulations can be designed to protect vulnerable consumers, particularly the
elderly, who are less able to adapt to digital financial services.
The research builds on empirical findings that highlight the vulnerability of the elderly population to financial exclusion due to their lower levels of digital literacy, cognitive impairments, and lack of access to technology. The central research objective is to determine how legal and regulatory frameworks can be reformed or designed to ensure financial inclusion for the elderly. The project spans multiple disciplines, including law, sociology, and political economy, and involves a comparative study of the legal systems in various countries such as the U.S.A., EU member states, and the UK. This comparative approach will provide insights into the global dimensions of the issue.
The prevalence of company groups in the modern economic landscape creates multiple new legal challenges. The regulations currently in force were created for autonomous entities, operating independently, in their own interest and on their own account. With the emergence of corporate groups, consisting of several, a dozen or even several hundred formally separate entities acting collectively, the fundamental principles underlying the authors of contemporary codes have been called into question. The search for specific rules for the creation, operation and, in particular, liability within so-called holdings has become one of the leading problems in many areas of law. Apart from company law, where this topic has been of great interest for many years, a particularly interesting area of regulation in this regard is competition law, located on the borderline between public and private law and harmonised at the EU level. Meanwhile, the direct impulse to undertake research on antitrust holding liability is provided by newly designed regulations introducing into the Polish legal system - following EU standards - liability for competition law violations by an entity exercising decisive influence on the direct infringer (RCL project No. UC69).
The project aims to analyse the prerequisites for antitrust liability in a holding company and to answer the question: what is the actual objective of piercing liability (i.e. both administrative and civil liability for the actions of another company within the same holding
company) in competition law, in light of the well-established decisional practice of the EU antitrust authority? This question is particularly pertinent in the context of recent case law indicating that a subsidiary can be held liable for damages caused by an infringement of competition law by its parent company. Preliminary research suggests that, contrary to the assumptions of the European Commission and the Court of Justice, this aim is by no means prevention or the need to ensure the effectiveness of the law, but rather increased repression. The project involves a precedent-setting comparison between antitrust liability and the general principles of vicarious liability (for the conduct of another) in other liability regimes. In addition to the traditional in legal sciences dogmatic method, the research will also draw extensively on the law-comparative method and the economic analysis of law. The American and German legal systems will be a particularly important point of reference.