In the context of COVID-19, adoption of teleworking challenges companies' culture and social interaction to foster a creative and innovative workplace. The article aims to identify the auditors’ perception of different factors that influence work adaptability in remote audit activity. The research method is based on multivariate data analysis that consist of correspondence analysis, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and generalised linear ordinal regression. On one hand, findings emphasise that auditors’ perception on the work efficiency of auditors in remote audits is significantly influenced by the digitalization degree of audit activities. On the other hand, the research outlines the main threats and opportunities of remote auditing in the context of the current pandemic restrictions. Where auditors perceive the benefits of remote audit, they appreciate positively the degree of adaptability and work efficiency as regards teleworking. Opportunities perceived lead to enhanced audit activity outcome if audit companies embrace emergent technologies in the new digital workplace. Nevertheless, as transition to remote audit determines increased auditors’ liability and audit risks, auditors are more cautious and sometimes reluctant about future scenarios of remote audit, if innovative emerging audit technologies and integrated GRCs are not used or are not properly implemented. Whatever the future holds for the new digital audit workplace, it is obvious that auditors working from home face specific challenges, because what they earn in efficiency, they lose in benefits that are harder to quantify, such as innovative thinking and creativity.

To achieve sustainable development, companies are aware that they need to move from the ‘take-make-consume-throw away’ pattern toward an economic model based on sharing, re-use, repair, refurbishing, and recycling. Implementing the circular economy concept into a company’s business model is not an easy process, given that some eco-innovations have higher costs with direct effects on financial performance. Hence, this study aims to determine the relationship between corporate financial performance and the performance measures of the circular economy through multivariate econometric estimations. The observations considered in our sample reflect the financial and circular economy performance for 411 companies with headquarters in the European G7 members disclosed in the period 2014-2020. The EU was chosen to carry out the study because the member states subscribe to a general reporting framework and the European Green Deal agreement, making it the most active in implementing the circular economy model. The findings are based on the econometric models related to the nature and amplitude of the association relation between firms’ financial performance and circular economy in connection with firms’ performance. The results show that the performance of the circular economy has a relatively small influence on the firms’ financial performance.

Currently, sustainability and sustainable development are issues that concern society due to the high degree of pollution and the measures taken that, in many cases, do not prove their efficiency. Economic entities are aware that their involvement in the community has become necessary for the sustainable development of any business. The promotion of responsibility towards the environment is an important principle of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is becoming an obligation that can no longer be exempted. Our intention in this paper was to study the changes generated by the European Union (EU) Directive 2014/95 regarding the manner in which oil entities listed at the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE) and the Athens Stock Exchange (ATHEX) between 2014 and 2018, report environment-related information. We also identified whether entities in fields that are known as polluting were more sensitive to environmental factors and if they tended to report more information compared to other business sectors. To achieve these objectives, we used qualitative and quantitative research. Namely, we analyzed the entities’ non-financial reports, to identify their social responsibility actions, and we tested if they were correlated with the environment protection and also with the 2014/95 European directive stipulations. For the entities operating in this polluting area, demonstrating transparency regarding the efforts and investments made to counteract the environmental impacts is important. Non-financial corporate reporting can be an opportunity to integrate sustainability into a company’s business practices and strategies to obtain benefits and to increase efficiency and, thus, to increase stakeholder confidence. The contribution of our study is to highlight the importance of non-financial information for the sustainable development of companies and the environment.

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.