Heorhiy Rohov

The ambitious goals of environmental sustainability stated in international agreements and national programs require developing strategies to achieve them. At the same time, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the environmental performance factors, which can be purposefully changed to achieve an effective result in the short and medium-term. The paper aims to find the institutional factors of national environmental performance, including financial ones, which might be effectively used as environmental sustainability management tools. For this, the relationships between the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), as the dependent variable, and the indicators of control of corruption, the effectiveness of an anti-monopoly policy, financial opportunities, undue influence, corporate culture, innovation output, GDP, and income growth among the poorest population, using a sample of 81 countries, and the technique for constructing nonlinear regression models based on the normalizing transformations for non-Gaussian data were studied.
The study findings show that environmental performance can be predicted with sufficient accuracy by a linear model of its dependence on corruption control, minority shareholders protection, judicial independence, favoritism in decisions of government officials, tax incentives, ease of access to loans, and innovation output. Adding GDP per capita to the explanatory variables of the EPI model does not significantly affect the result accuracy but changes the model shape from linear to nonlinear. The paper substantiates ways to apply results for institutional reforms and sustainability management, such as inflation targeting, public credit guarantee schemes, performance-based loans, etc.

The paper is devoted to an under-researched topic of the international business community’s reaction to russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine. It aims to evaluate how G7 and EU financial sanctions, institutional pressure, ESG ratings, and asset value of multinational banks in russia influence their decisions to reduce activities in the invading country. The study used the Yale CELI database of companies leaving and staying in Russia for the classification tree method. The results show that none of the banks headquartered in G7 and EU member states that had no or relatively little assets in russia before the invasion are doing business there on a pre-war scale. Unlike banks headquartered in other countries, most either curtailed their presence in that market or exited the market. This indicates that financial sanctions imposed by G7 and EU member states and institutional pressure on banks in these countries to withdraw from the russian market have proven effective to a certain extent. However, these factors do not meaningfully influence the business of multinational banks with significant assets in russia. The study has not confirmed the hypothesis that a bank with higher ESG ratings is more likely to curtail its operations in the market of an aggressor country and withdraw. However, nearly all banks that scaled back significant activities or even pulled out of russia have better ESG indicators than the industry average. The results suggest the feasibility of improving the methodologies of ESG rating providers for accurately measuring business reactions to aggression and war crimes.

Dividend policy, as part of corporate governance, is largely dependent on the institutional environment in which companies operate. The study aims to determine factors affecting dividend policy in the conditions of the Ukrainian underdeveloped stock market, legal insecurity of minority shareholders, high cost and concentration of capital. For this purpose, hypotheses about the impact of a company’s financial state, size, business risk, and ownership structure on dividend payments were tested using a sample of 58 Ukrainian non-financial public joint-stock companies and applying Interactive tree classification techniques (C&RT). The resulting classification model for predicting dividend decisions correctly classifies 92.86% of companies that paid dividends and 93.3% of companies that did not. The findings, based on the classification tree and importance scale, prove the hypothesis that companies in which individuals and institutional investors have a controlling interest are more likely to pay dividends than other non-state companies. The financial indicators accurately classify only those firms that do not pay dividends, and business risk does not affect classification accuracy at all. The paper substantiates the ways of using the study findings for economic regulation, protection of minority shareholders’ rights, and proliferation of modern corporate governance practices.