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Achieving the goals of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development requires substantial investment and depends on the ability to attract private capital to complement public resources. Venture Capital (VC) investments have traditionally focused on sectors such as technology, healthcare, and clean energy, which align closely with the enhancement of sustainable development, and VC investors can accelerate progress toward sustainability by providing expertise and mentorship to startups working on sustainable solutions. This study aims to contribute to the literature on the intersection between finance and sustainability by investigating whether higher VC investments are associated with a higher level of achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Using a panel data fixed effect model on a sample covering more than 100 countries, we find that a higher level of VC activity is associated with stronger SDGs' performances, with this effect being primarily driven by economic factors. We document heterogeneous effects related to the round of investments as well as the organizational form of VC investors and the industry and country of the VC-backed companies.

We exploit the natural experimental setting provided by the Covid-19 lockdown to analyse how performance is affected by a friendly audience. Specifically, we use data on all football matches in the top-level competitions across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom over the 2019/2020 season. We compare the difference between the number of points gained by teams playing at home and teams competing away before the Covid-19 outbreak, when supporters could attend any match, with the same difference after the lockdown, when all matches took place behind closed doors. We find that the performance of the home team is halved when stadiums are empty. Further analyses indicate that offensive (defensive) actions taken by the home team are drastically reduced (increased) once games are played behind closed doors. Referees are affected too, as they change their behaviour in games without spectators. Finally, the home advantage is entirely driven by teams that do not have international experience. Taken together, our findings corroborate the hypothesis that social pressure influences individual behaviour.

This paper explores the role of green innovation in attracting venture capital (VC) financing. We use a unique dataset that matches information on equity transactions, companies’ balance sheet variables and data on patented innovation at the firm level over the period 2008–2017. Taking advance of a novel granular definition of green innovative activities that tracks patents at the firm level, we show that green innovators are more likely to receive VC funding compared to other equity financing than firms without green patents. Likewise, a larger share of green vs. non-green patents in a firm’s patent portfolio increases the probability of receiving VC finance with respect to other equity. Robustness checks and extensions tackling several dimensions of heterogeneity confirm the attractiveness of green patenting for VC investment.

This paper investigates the environmental Kuznets’ curve hypothesis for total primary energy supply and CO2 from fuel combustion over the period 1971–2015. Our analysis has two distinguishing features. Firstly, it adopts a robustness approach by (a) using both parametric and semi-parametric methods, and (b) analysing different geographical scales. Secondly, it strictly adheres to the EKC narrative by (a) not using control variables and (b) taking Energy and CO2 in absolute rather than in per capita terms, which is consistent with the fact that “Nature cares” about absolute pressures. We show how evidence for EKC changes depending on the model specification, the sample, and the used variables. Hence, this paper contributes to explaining why the literature on the EKC gives mixed results. The multiscale perspective and some theoretical considerations, however, tell how to perform the analysis appropriately. Thus, we can affirm that, both for CO2 and Energy, the fragile evidence of EKC that was emerging at the end of the last century has vanished with the new wave of globalization. There is only evidence of decreasing elasticities for very-high income countries. Interestingly, the great recession might have produced structural reductions in TPES and CO2 in the affected countries. Finally, the case of Germany, which shows EKC patterns, indicates that active energy policies can reduce energy and CO2 without harming the economy.