The world is constantly changing, and with an evolving global environmental crisis, there is a growing trend of Corporate Social Responsibility, and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure initiatives. The final report on the new E.U. taxonomy for sustainable activities was released in 2020, making ESG disclosure more relevant. This paper investigates the effects of ESG initiatives on the financial performance of Norwegian listed companies from 2010 to 2019. ESG is measured through the Thomson Reuters Eikon ESG disclosure score and financial performance through ROA and Tobin’s Q. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this relationship has been investigated in Norway. Using panel data regression analysis and two proxies for the dependent variable (financial performance), the results of this study are mixed. In particular, findings suggest a strong significant relationship between ESG initiatives and financial performance. More specifically, the regression model, with ROA as the dependent variable, suggests that ESG initiatives have a clear negative impact. On the other hand, the variable Tobin’s Q increases when ESG increases. This could be explained by the different horizons of the measures and other factors affecting the business environment.

We contribute to the business strategy and the environment literature by examining the effect of political cost pressures on corporate environmental performance in the context of United Kingdom‐listed firms. Drawing on a sample of non‐financial firms from the FTSE All‐Share Index over a period of 10 years (2013–2022), we construct novel indices of political cost pressures, regulatory compliance, penalties and fines, strategic and risk management and market/social expectations, using textual analysis of annual reports. Employing firm fixed effects and two‐stage least squares (2SLS) models, we find that political cost pressures are significantly associated with lower carbon emissions (Scope 1 and Scope 2), with the strongest effects observed for regulatory and penalty‐related disclosures. The results persist over time when lead variables are used, supporting the temporal validity of the relationships. Overall, our findings advance the political cost hypothesis by demonstrating that mandatory disclosure and external scrutiny prompt firms to enhance their actual environmental performance, thereby reinforcing institutional and stakeholder accountability mechanisms.

This study examines whether U.S. monetary tightening cycles and market uncertainty are associated with initial public offering (IPO) underpricing. Using a sample of 1750 U.S. IPOs issued between 2003 and 2024, the analysis investigates three Federal Reserve monetary tightening cycles and employs multivariate regression models to examine the relationships between monetary-policy conditions, market uncertainty, proxied by the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX), and first-day IPO returns. The findings provide no consistent evidence that monetary tightening cycles are associated with higher IPO underpricing. Although descriptive evidence indicates higher underpricing during the 2022–2023 tightening period, the tightening indicators are not statistically significant in the controlled multivariate regressions. In contrast, market uncertainty is negatively associated with IPO underpricing. This relationship is statistically significant in the equity-only sample for both contemporaneous and one-day lagged VIX measures, while the lagged VIX also remains statistically significant in the full sample. These findings contribute to the IPO literature by showing that monetary tightening and market-based uncertainty exhibit different relationships with IPO pricing. The study also provides practical implications for issuers, underwriters, investors, and policymakers seeking to understand IPO pricing behaviour under changing macro-financial conditions.