The European Union’s environmental goal by 2050 is to become the first climate-neutral continent in the world. This means specific efforts for diversifying the energy mix and investing in low-carbon energy. Our study investigates the nexus among carbon emissions, energy consumption and mix, and economic growth in a modified framework that includes the contribution of inward foreign direct investments and international trade to lowering air pollution. We have used a two-step approach to explore in more detail the links between these variables in 24 EU countries over the period 1995–2018, followed by a panel VECM analysis. Our results indicate that there is a unidirectional link between economic growth and CO₂ emissions, which should imply a decoupling of environmental improvement measures from the pace of economic growth. We also find bidirectional causal relationships between low-carbon energy shares in consumption and CO₂ emissions, as well as between low-carbon energy share in consumption and GDP per capita, which confirms both pollution haven and the halo effect hypotheses for FDI on gas emissions. However, in the long term, FDI, exports, and imports have positively impacted the reduction in CO₂ emissions; therefore, stronger EU investment and trade integration should be promoted to improve the quality of the environment.

This paper proposes a new approach toward understanding the financial performance dynamics in the EU retail sector (pre-pandemic); we focus on the connection between indebtedness and solvency risk and other areas of corporate performance (e.g., liquidity, assets efficiency, and profitability). Its contribution resides in identifying the drivers behind solvency risk in a sector that went through significant transformations in recent decades, as well as the links between the various areas of performance of retailers, and their impacts on solvency risk, using the machine-learning random forest methodology. The results indicate a declining trend for solvency risk of EU food retailers after the global financial crisis and up until the beginning of the pandemic, which may reflect their maturity on the market, but also an adjustment to legal changes in the EU, meant to equalize the tax advantages of debt versus equity financing. Solvency risk accompanied by liquidity risk is a mark of the retail sector, and our results indicate that the most critical trade that EU retailers face is between solvency risk and liquidity, but is fading over time. The volatility of liquidity levels is an important predictor of solvency risk; hence, sustaining a stable and good level of liquidity supports lower risks of financial distress, and may mitigate the shock impacts for EU retailers. A higher solvency risk was accompanied by increased efficiency of asset use, but reduced profitability levels, which led to higher returns available to shareholders for high solvency risk retailers. Overall, retailers should focus on operational performance evidenced by financial indicator levels than on the volatility of these indicators as predictors of solvency risk.

The paper explores the long versus short-term attributes of the airline industry exposure to oil price risk in a macroeconomic framework that emphasizes the interconnections between various risk factors, which is the main contribution to the research in the field. A panel ARDL model and PMG estimator have been applied on monthly data between 2007 and 2020 to investigate the long-term equilibrium relationship between airline companies’ stock prices, oil price risk, financial market volatility, currency risk, inflation, and maturity risk. The negative impact of oil price risk on airlines’ stock prices is significant, robust, and pervasive, and is coupled with a concerning exposure to the US dollar currency risk. As another contribution, the paper analyses the prospects and challenges of the airline industry in dealing with oil price risk in the post-pandemic world. The results point towards the need of the airline industry to rethink its strategic decisions in the more uncertain and unpredictable post-pandemic world, requiring a more comprehensive approach of the complex and dynamic network of risk exposures and a reconsideration of hedging policies.

This paper focuses on the oil and gas sector because of its direct exposure to the complete range of ESG challenges, as well as strong pressure to change business models due to the energy transition. We investigate the ESG scores of a sample of global companies in this sector and their relationship to stock market performance and to the ESG intensity of corporate reports. As an original contribution, we incorporate the intensity of corporate discourse on technology-related sustainability topics for the first time in the literature. Our findings reveal that investors examine both sustainability discourse and results when determining a company’s value and validate the role of ESG scores and rankings in providing investors with an accurate and meaningful assessment of companies’ sustainability actions. Moreover, companies’ disclosure of their sustainable actions and technological developments related to sustainability is positively related to stock returns. This implies that a focus on sustainable practices and constant communication with investors might result in higher market performance. Furthermore, encouraging companies, particularly those in sectors and industries sensitive to ESG factors, to invest in ESG initiatives, is accompanied by improved performance, which makes them more attractive and better positioned to attract financing.

Specific and older age-associated comorbidities increase mortality risk in severe forms of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). We matched COVID-19 comorbidities with causes of death in 28 EU countries for the total population and for the population above 65 years and applied a machine-learning-based tree clustering algorithm on shares of death for COVID-19 comorbidities and for influenza and on their growth rates between 2011 and 2016. We distributed EU countries in clusters and drew a map of the EU populations’ vulnerabilities to COVID-19 comorbidities and to influenza. Noncommunicable diseases had impressive shares of death in the EU but with substantial differences between eastern and western countries. The tree clustering algorithm accurately indicated the presence of western and eastern country clusters, with significantly different patterns of disease shares of death and growth rates. Western populations displayed higher vulnerability to malignancy, blood-related diseases, and diabetes mellitus and lower respiratory diseases, while eastern countries’ populations suffered more from ischaemic heart, cerebrovascular, and circulatory diseases. Dissimilarities between EU countries were also present when influenza was considered. The heat maps of EU populations’ vulnerability to diseases based on mortality indicators constitute the basis for more targeted health policy strategies in a collaborative effort at the EU level.

Even though the literature implies that customers and banking organizations can profit from digital banking in various ways, client adoption of this service is still low, especially in emerging and developing nations. Consumers’ openness to digital services limits their willingness to adopt digital banking, especially mobile banking services. We used a quantitative research method based on a questionnaire sent during August–December 2022 to Romanian individuals and received 118 answers, which we analyzed using the logistic regression model; throughout, we determined the extent of mobile banking use, payments, and banking products needed within the population with tertiary education, as well as new developments that the shift to digitalization brings to users, with new features for existing products, cryptocurrency accounts, and fintech companies now being complementary to traditional banks. Our study presents current customer perceptions of implementing bank digitalization through mobile applications in a developing nation like Romania; here, advantages are counterbalanced by limitations and there are, undoubtedly, difficulties to be overcome in the quest for a more effective e-business framework. We determined the factors that are relevant in making people use fintech accounts using logit analysis.