Climate change, increased government efforts towards sustainable economic growth, and all types of resource constraint have raised concern among academics and practitioners about the path to follow for keeping firms’ competitive advantage in such a dynamic environment. The purpose of the paper is to explore how firms operating in the agricultural sector have understood the need to identify and follow the best practitioners in the market, performing a benchmarking analysis aimed at providing insights on firms’ financial sustainability. As the literature has not sufficiently addressed the problem of firms’ financial sustainability operating in the Romanian Agriculture sector, we provide some empirical evidence related to the before and post-pandemic periods. The benchmarking analysis is developed using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method, which measures firms’ efficiency in terms of financial performance. Overall, the results suggest there is still much work to be done, and firms operating in the agricultural sector show high variation in terms of productivity from the perspective of financial indicators. The results are even more relevant in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, showing that only a part of the firms analyzed have developed their own dynamic capabilities that help them effectively find solutions to adjusting to the volatility of the market in a short timeframe.

The paper examines if COVID-19 crisis has brought changes in companies’ approach on corporate reporting, with focus on annual reports. The research method is based on text mining techniques in order to build measures of readability and tone of uncertainty of annual reports, given the information published by the companies listed on four stock exchanges from Europe, namely the Bucharest Stock Exchange, ATHEX Stock Exchange, IBEX-35, and WIG-20 between 2017–2020. Findings emphasize, through text mining, multivariate analysis, and topic modeling, that the analyzed reports are less extensive in times of pandemic and tend to become more generic. Among firms’ financial performance metrics considered in our models, we found that there is a significant association only between annual reports textual characteristics and respectively, firm size, price earnings ratio and accruals reported. We prove as well significant stock exchange effects and industry effects. Our results show a slight decrease in annual reports readability, while the tone of uncertainty is more prominent within firms listed on less mature stock exchanges.

The economic and social transformations, the bankruptcies recorded, and the financial crisis affecting all economies have increased the interest for the corporate governance concept. Our intention in this paper was to study the impact of corporate governance attributes on performance given the information published by the entities listed on five stock exchanges from Europe, namely the main market from Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE) in Romania, the Athens Stock Exchange(ATHEX) main market in Greece, Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index (FTSE 100) from Great Britain, Spanish Stock Exchange 35 Index (IBEX 35) from Spain, and Warsaw Stock Exchange 20 Index (WIG 20) from Poland, between 2016–2018. Through mathematical modeling and multiple linear regression, we aimed to determine the extent to which corporate governance characteristics, firm characteristics, industry and stock market fixed effects, and random effects influence the performance of 226 entities included in our sample. The empirical findings revealed that CEO duality, the number of non-executive directors and women on board, audit committee, and audit opinion influenced performance measured by the Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE) indicators. The ideas highlighted and the results obtained in this research contribute to the literature that analyzes the extent to which an effective governance determines the increase in performance, needed for a sustainable development.

The main objective of the paper is to assess the relationship between firms’ financial resilience and firms’ strategic sustainable development vulnerabilities, in the context of implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on firms’ business environment. Background: The last decade has emphasized an increase in business models’ uncertainty and risk exposure. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the awareness in this direction, especially in a changing context, that looks more and more for corporate sector operations’ orientation towards sustainable development. The question we would address in this paper is how the nexus between corporate sustainability performance and corporate financial resilience is affected by management decision through process improvements, product quality assurance, or managers’ preference to improve corporate financials by earnings management practice instead, especially in the context of specific corporate financial risk management. Methods: The data are extracted from the Refinitiv database. The sample is limited to 275 European Union listed firms, selected based on data availability. The empirical analysis consists of an OLS multiple regression. For robustness purposes, a quantile regression model is estimated as well. Results: The approach considers implications of the pandemic on firms’ business environment and earnings management accounting based policies and strategies as well. The result suggests that alignment to sustainability frameworks lead to the deterioration of firms’ financial resilience. Similar results show the negative impact of firms’ financial vulnerability (credit default risk) on firms’ financial resilience. Instead, the risk of bankruptcy, firms’ liquidity, or high product quality and business process improvement determine the positive impact on firms’ financial resilience. Conclusions: The study highlights several insights both for management and policy makers. First, the results underline the relevance of management’s choice for earnings management on ensuring firms’ financial resilience, which ask for better corporate governance and high-quality and effective institutional regulatory and enforcement mechanisms. Second, the paper brings evidence on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on firms’ financial sustainable development. Third, the study emphasizes the importance of the efforts of corporate process improvements and high-quality products on generating value-add, by looking on the relevance of those drivers on the level of corporate economic value-add, a measure that limits the impact of discretionary management accrual-based accounting choices on our discussion.

In a global economic system where essential resources are limited, demand is increasing and environmental degradation is more pronounced, the only viable option to ensure sustainable development is to create an environmentally friendly and efficient economy in order to produce more economic value with the same or fewer resources. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into the macroeconomic implications determined by the transition to a forest bioeconomy, with a focus on the impact on the national gross value added. More specifically, this analysis assesses the relationship between the potential of the macroeconomic value creation on the forestry industry and the measures of progress on the transition towards sustainable forest management and long-term economic growth. The analysis refers to a period between 2013 and 2019, summing-up 133 observations, data that were reported by Eurostat for 23 European Union members. We propose a model that describes a construct of the potential of the value creation that can be generated by each country included in our sample, translated into an efficiency score determined using the Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA)methodology. The results highlighted that the evolution of economic, social, and environmental (ESG) context positively impacted the efficiency score. This positive evolution in time was mainly driven by the higher awareness of governments, companies, and people on the need for a transition to sustainable economic growth and sustainable forest management. Furthermore, this study highlights that the transition to sustainable economic growth implies negative changes to the cost structure of the economies, which lead to higher operational costs and lower gross value added. Moreover, our study provides more insight, from an econometric methodology perspective, regarding the synergy effect as determined by the transformation of business models in the forestry sector towards sustainable forest management.