In the context of increased awareness for complying with the multiple requirements for sustainable development, the stakeholders need to have the proper information for analyzing the corporate behaviors from various perspectives. Thus, the purpose of this research is to investigate and map the sustainability patterns of European companies at the beginning of 2019, in order to uncover valuable insights into the corporate sustainable behaviors. The Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performances of 1165 European companies were considered by applying the Kohonen neural network for clustering purposes at three main levels: (1) ESG overall level, including country and sectoral perspectives; (2) ESG thematic level; (3) ESG four-folded innovative level (stakeholder, perspective, management level and focus views). All three analyses carried out show a three-clustering solution—Lower, Middle and Higher ESG clusters. Most firms are top ESG performers and the companies with good ESG scores also have more related controversies. The results highlight the sustainability profiles of the examined companies. Firstly, the environmental and social priorities are preferred over corporate governance targets. Secondly, companies tend to implement a business-customized ESG approach for achieving organizational efficiency and competitiveness. Thirdly, there is a higher consideration of employees, external-directed measures, operational issues and process-orientation in the corporate ESG performance and development. The ESG approach of the European reporting companies is mainly mature, strategic and long-term oriented, aimed to increase the corporate competitiveness and to support the societal well-being altogether.

Sustainability bonds enable capital-raising and investment for those projects that have both a positive impact on the environment and a positive social outcome. This study examines the stock market reaction to the announcement of sustainability bonds issuance. The present research is designed as follows: first, an event study that examines the market reaction and second, a highlight of drivers influencing this market reaction via a linear regression with cluster-robust standard errors. Overall, small and negative sample-wide reactions to sustainability bond issue announcements were found. Additionally, the study finds significant negative abnormal returns before the publication in June 2018 of The Sustainability Bond Guidelines by the International Capital Market Association. Specifically, the size of the bond issue, whether the bond is callable or not, the announcement of the issue as a single event in a day, the company’s Return on Assets, the firm’s social disclosure score, and the issuance of the bond prior or after June 2018 are statistically significant factors that influence the stock returns of issuers.

No abstract

Summary: Nowadays, the human resources are considered the main factor for consolidating corporate competitiveness in the international business arena, especially taking into account the most recent transformations that deeply affected the economic and social environment in Central and Southeastern Europe. Following this argument, the objective of our research paper consists in emphasizing the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in the area of human resource management (HRM) for strengthening the competitiveness of companies in Central and Southeastern Europe. In this sense, our research focuses on top companies ranked by turnover in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, for which we determined by computation four innovative composite indices of CSR-HR in order to compare the corporate engagement in a set of employeerelated issues. The main issues, or pillars, that we took into account envisage the following: improvement of labour conditions and job satisfaction, work-private life balance, equal opportunities and promotion of diversity, personnel training and development, participation of employees in the decision-making process, fair payment and financial support for employees. In accordance with other studies in the field, the main findings reflect that the economic performance of the companies encourages the overall CSR measures targeting the employees in the companies from Central and Southeastern Europe countries. Detailed findings on the corresponding components of the CSR-HR index are also presented and justified. The paper ends with a suite of strategic recommendations for increasing corporate competitiveness in Central and Southeastern Europe through the CSR-HR continuum, while the findings could be extrapolated to more companies and countries.