Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are increasingly analysed to identify the risks and opportunities in contemporary economies. The banking sector influences the whole economy through the credit channel and balances its stability. The interplay of these elements motivated our main question, whether ESG scores impact European financial stability, measured for the banking sector. To this aim, we employ the cross-quantilogram methodology, which explores dependences at all levels of the distributions of two random variables. To determine the quantile dependence, we resort to methods of measuring systemic risk (Marginal Expected Shortfall—MES, CoVaR, and ΔCoVaR) for all commercial banks listed on European stock exchanges. While our approach provides a dashboard for analysis of the dependence of financial stability on ESG pillars, our findings indicate that such a connection is valid and cannot be identified with standard approaches that explore average distribution levels. We also document the differences in these impacts across the ESG pillars.

In this article, we aim to study systemic risk spillovers for European energy companies and to determine the spillover network of the energy sector with other economic sectors. To examine the spillovers within the energy sector, we employ three systemic risk measures. We then embed the results of these models into a Diebold–Yilmaz framework. Moreover, we consider an entropy procedure to extract a Bayesian formulation of its systemic risk spillover. This allows us to determine which company in our sample contributes the most to systemic risk, which company is the most vulnerable to systemic risk, and the place of the energy sector within risk networks. Our results reveal the fact that all companies manifest enhanced spillovers during 2008, early 2009, and 2020. These episodes are associated with the dynamics of the global financial crisis and the pandemic crisis. We notice that specific companies are risk drivers in the sector in both times of market turbulence and calm. Lastly, we observe that several economic sectors such as banks, capital goods, consumer services, and diversified financials generate relevant spillovers towards the energy sector.

In this paper, we study several determinants of academic achievement and professional aspirations on a sample of 397 Romanian high schoolers. Our aim is to shed light on the family, individual and school related factors that contribute to the students’ academic achievement and professional aspirations. We focus on Romania, an ex-transition, Central Eastern European country, overlooked in the scholarly literature. We carry out the first empirical, causal analysis on the impact of school counselling on academic success and professional aspirations in Romania. We rely on Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory [Bourdieu, 1986. The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. Greenwood Press; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977. Reproduction in education, society and culture. Sage] and Albert Bandura's self-efficacy theoretical framework [1989. Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta (Ed.), Annals of child development (Vol. 6, pp. 1–60). JAI Press., 1995. Self-efficacy in changing societies. Cambridge University Press]. Our results confirm our expectations that academic achievement is positively influenced by family income and the time parents spend with their children during the weekends. Professional aspirations are positively influenced by students’ perceived self-efficacy, parental moral support and parental career guidance. We further discuss the implications of our results for Romanian teenagers, their families and Romanian educational policies.

In modern societies, digitalization plays a tremendously important role for people and businesses. Apart from an economic representation, competitiveness characterizes a society from political, cultural, or human points of view. In this article, we aim to highlight the role of digital development from a competitiveness perspective, as there are few studies related to this relationship. The empirical investigation is based on panel data analysis for European Union countries for 2017–2022, considering the digital economy and society index (DESI) and the index developed by International Institute for Management Development (IMD), respectively IMD world competitiveness index. The results obtained are reported both for general indices and for the components of DESI, presented separately for the groups of Central and Eastern European countries and Western European countries. They indicate different influences for the two groups of countries, with only a few common aspects. The most obvious is the case of skilled labor. This aspect demonstrates the link between the various dimensions of digitalization and changes in human capital development strategies, as they appear in the specialized literature.

This paper examines the regulatory impact on the European Banking Sector using advanced deep learning techniques to analyze the relationship between Sustainable Finance guidelines and the SX7P Index from January 2012 to December 2023. Utilizing Long Short-Term Memory Auto-encoder (LSTM-AE), Variational Autoencoder (VAE), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for anomaly detection, the study compares anomalies and investigates their correlation with European Banking Authority (EBA) events and Sustainable Finance guidelines from January 2020 to December 2023. Through the analysis of 43 pertinent EBA documents, the research identifies patterns and variations in anomalies, assessing their association with regulatory changes. The results reveal significant anomalies aligning with regulatory events, indicating a potential causal relationship. Notably, the VAE methodology shows the strongest correlation between EBA Sustainable Finance events and anomalies. This research advances the understanding of deep learning applications in financial markets and offers valuable insights for policymakers and financial institutions regarding regulatory shifts in Sustainable Finance.

This review explores the interplay between renewable energy and monetary policy, highlighting how central banks can contribute to renewable energy development. Although the shift towards renewable energy is tremendous for sustainable development, it also comes with notable economic and financial challenges. Supervenient, the energy transition has raised significant interest among decision-makers and academia, prompting them to explore new innovative policies and strategies; as a result, these actions acknowledged that research in this field is essential for identifying optimal solutions. Moreover, recent global crises, including the energy crisis, have emphasised the important role of macroeconomic policies in crisis management. Within this framework, it’s essential to investigate how monetary policy, as the main tool of central banks, can foster renewable energy development. This comprehensive review systematically examines existing literature through a semi-structured literature analysis, which allows for a more flexible, complex, and thorough approach to identifying key issues and providing insights into the potential of monetary policy to address renewable energy challenges. We identified four main clusters of research: sustainability and development, economic growth and energy, monetary policy and investment, and emissions and renewable energy. Furthermore, exploring the interaction between monetary policy and renewable energy objectives to uncover paths for harmonizing monetary strategies with the goals of renewable energy development contributes to highlighting the existing gaps in the field and represents a starting point for further research topics. This study provides a comprehensive overview of the existing knowledge, identifies gaps in the literature, and suggests directions for future research.