We investigate the relationship between corporate and country sustainability on the cost of bank loans. We look into 470 loan agreements signed between 2005 and 2012 with borrowers based on 28 different countries across the world and operating in all major industries. Our principal findings...

Analysing the revised EU Sustainable Finance Strategy disseminated in two steps in April and July 2021, we identify as core issues of any sustainability-oriented financial regulation a lack of data on profitability of sustainable investments, a lack of broadly acknowledged theoretical insights...

The transition to a sustainable economy currently involves a fundamental transformation of our capital markets. Lawmakers, in an attempt to overcome this challenge, frequently seek to prescribe and regulate how firms may address environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns by formulating...

As part of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) program, the European Commission has pledged to issue up to EUR 250 billion of the NGEU bonds as green bonds, in order to confirm their commitment to sustainable finance and to support the transition towards a greener Europe. Thereby, the EU is not only...

Climate change is one of the highest-ranking issues on the political and social agenda. Vulnerabilities of the world ecosystem laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential damage for the human and business life made the need for urgent action clear once again. Corporations are one of the...

We propose a novel way of measuring the equity portfolio-level environmental and social characteristics of a 13F institution (the “sustainability footprint”) and examine the relation between sustainability footprints and risk-adjusted investment performance. The analysis shows that 13F...

This study investigates the growing importance of sustainability in financial markets by estimating the extent of capitalisation of companies' commitment to sustainability on their market value. The spreading concern for social and environmental issues, and especially for the material risks of...

This paper aims to assess the understanding of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations within the banking context and examines the current market practices in this area. To that extent this paper sets out the various definitions of ESG factors and also sets out how these then...