Lidia Loban

This study examines how procurement responds to upstream sustainability uncertainty in electric mobility supply chains and why some environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria become more operational than others. It develops an explanation of uneven ESG operationalisation based on information production costs and examines procurement as a supply chain information-processing function. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on seven semi-structured interviews with senior actors in the Basque electric mobility ecosystem, analysed using a Gioia-informed abductive approach. Organisational information processing theory was introduced during second-order interpretation rather than as a predefined coding template. Findings The analysis identifies three forms of sustainability uncertainty: informational opacity beyond direct suppliers, measurement instability across ESG dimensions and interpretive ambiguity in sustainability information. Procurement responds through asking, verifying, comparing and defending supplier information. The effort varies with organisational resources, the ability to make sustainability commensurable with price and the knowledge required to evaluate supplier evidence. These differences help explain uneven ESG operationalisation. Supplier information may later support reporting, circular practices and finance-related assessment, but these downstream uses are not tested as outcomes. Originality The paper shifts attention from the ESG criteria included in supplier evaluation to the organisational effort required to produce usable supplier information. It explains uneven ESG operationalisation through information production costs and specifies how procurement responds to upstream sustainability uncertainty through information-processing work conditioned by organisational capacity.

This paper examines how corporate governance structures and capital adequacy jointly shape the relationship between credit risk and sovereign debt allocation. Using an international sample of 498 listed banks, comprising 2,668 observations from 45 countries over the period 2015–2024, we find that board-specific skills are the primary governance moderator, with results robust across specifications. Capital adequacy plays a key role in this relationship: board skills significantly moderate the association between credit risk and sovereign debt allocation in well-capitalized banks, but not in capital-constrained banks. In terms of economic significance, a simultaneous one-standard-deviation increase in board skills and non-performing loans reduces sovereign debt allocation by 21 basis points, equivalent to 3.4% of mean holdings. Governance moderation is mainly observed among non-US banks, where sovereign exposure appears to reflect concentrated risk, with both board skills and affiliations playing a significant role. By contrast, this effect is largely absent among US banks, where sovereign holdings are more consistent with safe-asset demand. Finally, a principal component analysis confirms that composite governance indices may mask dimension-specific effects.

Under the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation, Article 8 and Article 9 funds disclose a minimum share of sustainable investment in their precontractual RTS annex. This number is a selfimposed floor, not a portfolio measure. This paper measures the distance between that floor and the sustainable investment share later reported for the portfolio. Using Article 8 and Article 9 equity funds from 2023 to 2025, declared minimums are extracted from multilingual RTS annexes and merged with Morningstar portfolio data. The gap is wide and dispersed among Article 8 funds, but narrower and more concentrated among Article 9 funds, consistent with a more binding commitment. It also varies systematically across domiciles, consistent with national supervisory practice shaping how conservatively funds declare. The results matter for SFDR 2.0. Many Article 8 funds already hold sustainable portfolios above the proposed 70 percent threshold while declaring below it, so a threshold tied to declared commitments could reorder labels without reallocating capital. The proposed 15 percent Taxonomy route is different, because realized Taxonomy alignment is close to zero for most funds. The findings show that a harmonized disclosure field can remain weakly informative when the disclosed level is discretionary.

We ask whether Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) labels certify pre-existing portfolio differences or induce portfolio change. We match 718 Article 8 and Article 9 funds to never-classified peers on size, age, fees, and flows, and compare portfolio composition and trading direction across 4,666 European UCITS equity funds over 33 quarters of position-level holdings data. Labeled funds hold cleaner portfolios. Their carbon intensity is 26.1 tonnes of CO2 per million dollars of investee revenue lower and their ESG risk percentile is 6.2 points lower, and both differences are significant at the 1 percent level. They do not rebalance more or hold more concentrated portfolios. Instead, they allocate 0.8 percentage points more of their rebalancing activity to buying green names, while showing no significant difference in brown holdings or brown selling relative to peers. These gaps were already visible before SFDR enforcement, when no fund yet carried an SFDR label. The evidence points to certification of pre-existing portfolio substance rather than regulation-induced portfolio change.

The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) aims to support the Paris Agreement while improving transparency in financial markets. However, recent studies question the validity of the SFDR product classifications, raising concerns about greenwashing. Using a panel of 4,759 Europe-domiciled funds, we examine how the SFDR affects the environmental performance of self-designated ESG funds. Building on the institutional theory and estimating difference-in-differences models, we find that disclosure requirements exert normative pressures on ESG funds, leading to lower carbon emission intensity. We further assess whether the SFDR categories are associated with different environmental outcomes. Our results indicate that impact-aligned funds (Article 9) closely mirror the behavior of funds without sustainability claims (Article 6 and unclassified). These findings contribute on the debate on whether disclosure-based regulation can translate into firm-level decarbonization and support the progress toward a net-zero economy.