The paper aims to emphasize the role of the monetary policy and the central bank's position concerning the financial stability in the new context created by the global financial crisis, and given that it pursues the price stability, as the primary objective. The analysis highlights the need to review the position of the central bank in order to promote a more proactive stance to deal with financial stability, beyond the traditional framework of regulation and supervision, but there is a risk of emerging conflicts derived from the pursuance of the primary objective (the price stability) while maintaining financial stability

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are increasingly analysed to identify the risks and opportunities in contemporary economies. The banking sector influences the whole economy through the credit channel and balances its stability. The interplay of these elements motivated our main question, whether ESG scores impact European financial stability, measured for the banking sector. To this aim, we employ the cross-quantilogram methodology, which explores dependences at all levels of the distributions of two random variables. To determine the quantile dependence, we resort to methods of measuring systemic risk (Marginal Expected Shortfall—MES, CoVaR, and ΔCoVaR) for all commercial banks listed on European stock exchanges. While our approach provides a dashboard for analysis of the dependence of financial stability on ESG pillars, our findings indicate that such a connection is valid and cannot be identified with standard approaches that explore average distribution levels. We also document the differences in these impacts across the ESG pillars.

In this article, we aim to study systemic risk spillovers for European energy companies and to determine the spillover network of the energy sector with other economic sectors. To examine the spillovers within the energy sector, we employ three systemic risk measures. We then embed the results of these models into a Diebold–Yilmaz framework. Moreover, we consider an entropy procedure to extract a Bayesian formulation of its systemic risk spillover. This allows us to determine which company in our sample contributes the most to systemic risk, which company is the most vulnerable to systemic risk, and the place of the energy sector within risk networks. Our results reveal the fact that all companies manifest enhanced spillovers during 2008, early 2009, and 2020. These episodes are associated with the dynamics of the global financial crisis and the pandemic crisis. We notice that specific companies are risk drivers in the sector in both times of market turbulence and calm. Lastly, we observe that several economic sectors such as banks, capital goods, consumer services, and diversified financials generate relevant spillovers towards the energy sector.

In the wake of last crises, there is an increased awareness regarding the role of a sound corporate governance framework for enhancing the financial stability. We believe, however, that the relationship between corporate governance and financial stability is an indirect one; companies are not obliged to pursue financial stability unless specific legislation or regulations require it. Interestingly, having such targets, large firms, especially those operating in the financial system, can lead to systemic risks, supporting financial contagion. Classical problems of corporate governance such as top management compensation, board composition, and independence of the director, agent theory or the correct valuation are problems envisaged to be analyzed when assessing how they affect financial stability

Public procurement is considered an important driver of an economy and has a considerable power in orienting the market, including toward environmental protection policies and strategies. This study examines the green public procurement practiced at the level of local Romanian authorities with the aim of understanding the real context by highlighting the mix between what is required and/or expected from local authorities and what is actually happening in terms of green public procurement. The research is based on the results of an online survey conducted from 16 August 2019 to 18 September 2019. The research results show that green procurement is not a subject approached in many administrative units; however, it appears that environmental protection in the context of public procurement is considered important. In line with other research, our results enrich the current knowledge on green procurement practices at the local government level and indicate that increased regulatory pressure for green public procurement may lead to market development and innovation for green goods and services.

In modern societies, digitalization plays a tremendously important role for people and businesses. Apart from an economic representation, competitiveness characterizes a society from political, cultural, or human points of view. In this article, we aim to highlight the role of digital development from a competitiveness perspective, as there are few studies related to this relationship. The empirical investigation is based on panel data analysis for European Union countries for 2017–2022, considering the digital economy and society index (DESI) and the index developed by International Institute for Management Development (IMD), respectively IMD world competitiveness index. The results obtained are reported both for general indices and for the components of DESI, presented separately for the groups of Central and Eastern European countries and Western European countries. They indicate different influences for the two groups of countries, with only a few common aspects. The most obvious is the case of skilled labor. This aspect demonstrates the link between the various dimensions of digitalization and changes in human capital development strategies, as they appear in the specialized literature.