Countries enact environmental regulations to achieve sustainable development and ecological sustainability. However, environmental regulations do not guarantee environmental sustainability unless implemented efficiently. Furthermore, political institutions play a key role in the formulation and management of environmental regulations. This research examines the relationship between democracy, environmental regulations, economic growth, and ecological footprint (EF) in the panel of G7 nations from 1985 to 2017. Second generation econometric techniques are used to analyze the data. The empirical evidence indicates that economic growth enhances EF while democracy and environmental regulations positively contribute to ecological sustainability by reducing EF. The causal outcomes reveal that democracy Granger causes EF and renewable energy indicating that democracy curbs environmental degradation and stimulates the share of renewables. Further, democracy and environmental regulations Granger cause each other. Lastly, the implication of these findings for sustainable development and ecological sustainability are discussed.

The high pace of economic growth has posed many challenges. These challenges include depletion of natural resources, globalization challenges, and environmental degradation. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) economies are rich in mineral resources. Economic globalization has put the MENA countries in the spotlight for the developed world. Despite the status of being a hotspot for mineral resource richness, there is limited research on the effect of natural resources and economic globalization on the environmental degradation of the MENA countries. This paper examines the effects of natural resource abundance and economic globalization on environmental quality by considering trade openness, urbanization, and economic growth from the year 1980 to 2018. We apply second‐generation panel cointegration techniques along with continuously updated fully modified (Cup‐FM) and continuously updated bias‐corrected (Cup‐BC) techniques. The findings show that natural resource abundance significantly improves environmental quality. Likewise, economic globalization also mitigates emissions levels in the MENA countries. In contrast, trade openness, urbanization, and economic growth significantly deteriorate environmental quality. The unidirectional link indicates natural resources and economic globalization create trade openness. The paper provides novel empirical evidence and policy recommendations for sustainable development goals.

The last three decades have witnessed a huge amount of research exploring the linkage between companies' sustainability performance (SP), sustainability disclosure and financial performance (FP). Researchers have applied various methods and techniques to investigate this relationship, yet the results remain equivocal. In this article, we look inside this black box by considering various manifestations of sustainability practices and investigating their link with FP. We apply a manual content analysis technique to analyse the sustainability reports of the 100 best‐performing US firms. Our results reveal that fragmentation in the results is caused by the SP measurement. Additionally, we note that the interlinkages between different SP dimensions and sub‐dimensions are weak and somewhat contradictory. The results help draw important policy implications for the development of an SP reporting framework.

This article analyzes the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) decoupling and financial market outcomes. CSR decoupling refers to the gap between CSR disclosure and CSR performance. More specifically, we analyze the effect of CSR decoupling on analysts’ forecast errors, cost of capital, and access to finance. We also examine the moderating effect of forecast errors on relationships between CSR decoupling and cost of capital and access to finance. For a sample of U.S. firms consisting of 7,681 firm-year observations for the period 2006–2015, our empirical evidence supports the idea that a wider gap results in higher analysts’ forecast errors, a greater cost of capital, and reduced access to finance. In addition, our results show that forecast errors enhance the effect of the CSR decoupling on cost of capital and access to financial resources. We also note that external monitoring, in the form of greater analysts’ coverage, reduces CSR decoupling.