On 11 March 2020, the WHO declared the COVID-19 epidemic to be a global pandemic. This was a consequence of the rapid increase in the number of people with positive test results, the increase in deaths due to COVID-19, and the lack of pharmaceutical drugs. Governments introduced national lockdowns, which have impacted both energy consumption and economies. The purpose of this paper is to answer the following question: do COVID-19 lockdowns affect the business cycle? We used the cycle clock approach to assess the magnitude of decrease in electricity consumption in the three waves of the epidemic, namely, April 2020, November 2021, and April 2021. Additionally, we checked the relation between energy consumption and GDP by means of spectral analysis. Results for selected 28 European countries confirm an impact of the introduced non-pharmaceutical interventions on both energy consumption and business cycle. The reduction of restrictions in subsequent pandemic waves increased electricity consumption, which suggests movement out of the economic recession.

Integrated reports combine financial and non-financial data into a comprehensive report outlining the company’s value creation process. Our objective is to find the completeness of disclosures, which is a crucial aspect of an integrated report’s quality. This study contributes to the integrated reporting examination by identifying quantitative and qualitative gaps when applying Integrated Reporting standards, focusing on the energy sector. We conducted the study on 57 published integrated reports of listed companies in Poland. The content of each report was examined for 49 features divided into eight areas. We identify the strengths and weaknesses of current reporting performance and the impact of the company’s sector on reports’ quality. We noted that there are significant differences among the areas. The major problems concern implementing IIRC’s framework on the connections between the business model and the organization’s strategy, risks, opportunities, and performance. Our research also noted that the level of specific disclosures might be related to a company’s ownership structure. We investigated the significance of differences among companies from the energy and non-energy sectors using statistical methods. As a result of the study, we obtained that disclosures’ completeness depends on the operation sector. The companies in the energy sector publish higher-quality integrated reports than companies in the other sectors.

We examine the price drivers in 18 capital housing markets in Poland from 2004 to 2021. Using the Bayesian Model Averaging method, we discovered that some financial elements explain house price changes more consistently than conventional economic and demographic variables. The dynamics of house prices in most cities were defined explicitly by financial factors – mortgage market activity, mortgage interest rate, and terms and conditions of granting mortgages. Additionally, the stock market played a vital role in house price movement in selected cities. Economic (regional GDP, salaries, unemployment) and demographic (migration) factors were significant predictors of housing price dynamics only for particular cities. Our study closes the knowledge gap on factors influencing home price dynamics in Poland and other developing nations that have gone through systemic change. In the case of Eastern European countries, we have limited knowledge of those linkages.