The numbers are striking. Among the students surveyed in ten high schools between January and June 2022, 53.7 percent reported having gambled at some point in their lives, despite the fact that gambling is illegal for anyone under 18 in Italy. More alarming still, one in five of those with lifetime experience—20.1 percent—reported gambling regularly, defined as at least once a month. The study covered five gambling formats, from slot machines and video lottery terminals to lotteries, sports betting, scratch cards, and card games of chance such as poker and blackjack, and asked participants about their use of each format regardless of whether it happened online or in person.

The researchers went beyond simple prevalence figures by asking a deceptively simple question: do these teenagers know people who gamble every day or almost every day? They mapped exposure across four mutually exclusive social circles—close relatives such as parents and siblings, other relatives such as grandparents and cousins, friends, and acquaintances. Nearly half of the adolescents reported knowing at least one habitual gambler somewhere in their network. Thirty percent knew an acquaintance who gambled daily, 21 percent knew a friend, 15.8 percent knew a more distant relative, and 8.8 percent knew a close relative with a daily gambling habit.

To quantify these relationships rigorously, the team used modified Poisson regression with generalized estimating equations, a statistical approach that yields adjusted prevalence ratios while accounting for the fact that students within the same school are not independent observations. Because only ten school clusters were available, the researchers employed a bias-reduced cluster-robust covariance estimator with Satterthwaite degrees of freedom—a technical safeguard against overstating statistical confidence in small-cluster settings. The models adjusted for legal sex, year of birth, school type, and nationality, and the social exposure variables were tested both individually and simultaneously to determine which social circles exerted independent effects.

The results were unambiguous. After mutual adjustment across all four social circles, knowing a habitual gambler among friends nearly doubled the prevalence of regular gambling, with an adjusted prevalence ratio of 1.90. Acquaintances came next at 1.64, followed by close relatives at 1.42. Only the association with more distant relatives—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—disappeared once the other circles were accounted for, suggesting that the influence of extended family operates through the same channels as friends and acquaintances rather than independently. Perhaps most compelling was the dose-response pattern: regular gambling prevalence climbed steadily with the number of social circles containing a habitual gambler, from 1.81 times higher with one circle to 3.86 times higher with all four, yielding an overall trend of 1.47 per additional circle.

The sociodemographic patterns revealed a telling split between gambling initiation and gambling escalation. Lifetime gambling was more common among older students and less common among those born abroad, who showed a prevalence ratio of 0.64 compared with Italian-born peers—a difference the authors attribute to Italy’s exceptionally liberalized gambling culture relative to the countries of origin of many migrant families. Yet among those who had ever gambled, nationality no longer mattered for regular play. Sex and school type told the opposite story: while boys and girls were equally likely to have tried gambling, boys were 1.81 times more likely to gamble regularly, and students in technical and vocational institutes—schools that in Italy disproportionately enroll students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds—were 1.39 and 1.53 times more likely to do so than lyceum students.

The authors interpret these findings through the lens of the social ecological model, which frames health behaviors as products of interactions between individual characteristics and influences operating at multiple levels of the social environment. Knowing people who gamble habitually may shape two distinct kinds of social norms: descriptive norms, which concern perceptions of how common gambling is, and injunctive norms, which concern perceptions of how socially approved it is. When a teenager sees daily gambling among friends, relatives, and acquaintances simultaneously, both types of norms are reinforced, normalizing the behavior across every layer of daily life. The graded association across multiple circles echoes what behavioral scientist Damon Centola has called complex contagion—the idea that behaviors spread more reliably when reinforced by multiple social contacts, much as an epidemic accelerates when a susceptible person encounters multiple sources of infection.

This epidemiological framing leads directly to a provocative policy prescription: treat adolescent gambling prevention the way public health treats infectious disease. Just as vaccination raises individual resistance while sanitation reduces exposure, the authors argue, gambling prevention should combine interventions that strengthen resistance—gambling literacy programs, critical thinking training, and emotional regulation skills targeted at vulnerable groups such as boys in technical and vocational schools—with environmental measures that cut the pathways of transmission. Those measures could include restrictions on gambling advertising and online promotion, limits on physical access to gambling venues, peer-led campaigns delivered through digital and non-digital channels, and family-based programs designed to reshape social norms and reduce the visibility of gambling within households and friendship groups.

The study’s limitations deserve honest weight. Because the data are cross-sectional, causality cannot be established: adolescents who gamble may simply seek out gambling friends, a process of social selection rather than social influence, and both dynamics may operate simultaneously. Both the participants’ own gambling and their perceptions of gambling in their networks came from the same respondent, opening the door to false consensus bias, in which gamblers overestimate how much the people around them gamble. The sample came from a single city—famously dubbed one of Italy’s gambling capitals in the early 2000s—which may limit generalizability, and socioeconomic status was not directly measured, leaving residual confounding possible. Data were also collected in 2022, before the most recent shifts in digital gambling availability.

Nevertheless, the scale of the sample, the high response rate of 95 percent among enrolled students, and the consistency of findings across multiple sensitivity analyses—including a full-sample analysis designed to rule out collider bias—lend the conclusions considerable credibility. The message for parents, educators, and policymakers is that underage gambling is not merely an individual failing or a matter of personal vulnerability. It is a socially patterned behavior that clusters within networks, escalates with cumulative exposure, and follows the same contagion logic that governs smoking, vaping, and other adolescent risk behaviors. If the goal is to stop gambling from taking root in the next generation, the evidence suggests that changing what teenagers see around them every day may matter as much as anything we teach them in a classroom.

Subject of Research: Social exposure to habitual gambling and its association with gambling involvement among Italian adolescents

Article Title: Social Exposure to Gambling and Gambling Involvement Among 4176 Italian Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Article References: Mosconi, G., Silvestri, G., Barello, S., Taverna, F., Feder, S., & Odone, A. (2026). Social Exposure to Gambling and Gambling Involvement Among 4176 Italian Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-026-01734-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11469-026-01734-z

Keywords: adolescent gambling, social networks, Italy, public health, prevention, social ecological model, peers, risk factors, cross-sectional study, gambling addiction, social norms, Social

The study, titled “Socio-Culturally Responsive VR Training for Enhancing English Teachers’ Pragmatic Competence,” was conducted by researchers Mohsen Mahmoudi-Dehaki and Nasim Nasr-Esfahani. Published online on August 27, 2026, in the journal ECNU Review of Education, the work focuses on the specific challenges faced by educators in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. In these environments, opportunities for authentic, real-world interaction are often limited, making it difficult for teachers to practice context-sensitive communication repeatedly.

Pragmatic competence is defined as the ability to use language appropriately in real-world situations. For instance, a request, refusal, apology, or complaint can be expressed in numerous grammatically correct ways. However, the most appropriate choice depends heavily on factors such as the social relationship between speakers, power dynamics, social distance, and cultural expectations. Traditional classroom instruction can explain these pragmatic rules, but providing repeated opportunities to practice them in realistic, high-stakes situations remains a significant challenge for teacher education programs.

To investigate whether immersive technology could address this pedagogical gap, the researchers employed a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. The study involved 122 randomly selected EFL teachers who participated in a comprehensive 108-hour intervention. This program utilized fully immersive VR simulations featuring artificial intelligence (AI)-driven avatars. The simulations were designed to incorporate diverse sociocultural scenarios, varying speech acts, power relations, and levels of social distance, ensuring that the training was not merely linguistic but deeply contextual.

The intervention followed a human-on-the-loop (HOTL) approach, which maintains human involvement in the AI-supported learning process. This design choice was critical in ensuring that the technology served as a facilitator of learning rather than a replacement for human interaction. Participants completed verbal discourse completion tasks (DCTs) both before and after the training period. These tasks allowed the researchers to quantitatively assess changes in the teachers’ pragmatic competence, specifically looking at their ability to navigate complex social and cultural expectations.

The results of the study demonstrated that participants achieved statistically significant improvements in pragmatic competence following the 108-hour training program. These gains were evident in two key dimensions: pragmalinguistic accuracy and sociopragmatic appropriateness. Pragmalinguistic accuracy refers to the ability to select and use appropriate linguistic forms, while sociopragmatic appropriateness relates to the ability to respond in a manner that aligns with the social and cultural expectations of a given situation. The data suggests that the immersive environment effectively targeted both the structural and social aspects of language use.

Qualitative data gathered through focus group interviews provided further insight into the mechanisms behind these improvements. Participants identified several key factors that contributed to their enhanced competence. These included immersive engagement, which kept learners focused and present in the simulated scenarios; real-time adaptive feedback, which allowed for immediate correction and learning; and increased communicative confidence. Additionally, teachers reported greater metapragmatic awareness, meaning they became more conscious of the pragmatic rules governing their speech, and engaged in reflective practice, analyzing why certain choices were appropriate in specific contexts.

The researchers emphasize that the value of the VR intervention lay not simply in the fact that teachers were practicing English in a virtual environment. Rather, the simulations created specific opportunities for participants to make communicative choices within sociocultural situations. By receiving adaptive feedback and reflecting on the appropriateness of their choices, teachers were able to internalize the complex social rules of English communication. This approach distinguishes the study from previous uses of VR in language education, which have often focused on conventional exercises rather than sociocultural responsiveness.

It is important to note that the researchers do not propose VR as a replacement for human interaction or conventional teacher education. Instead, they suggest that immersive technology can serve as an additional environment for professional learning. This is particularly relevant in EFL contexts where authentic interaction opportunities are constrained. The integration of AI-driven interaction with a socio-culturally responsive approach allows for a scalable and repeatable training environment that can be tailored to various social and cultural scenarios, providing a level of practice that is difficult to achieve in traditional classroom settings.

While the findings are promising, the researchers note that further research is needed to determine the long-term sustainability of these improvements. Specifically, it remains to be seen how effectively skills developed in immersive simulations transfer to teachers’ real-world professional and classroom interactions over time. The study contributes to the growing body of research on technology-enhanced language teacher education by demonstrating the potential of immersive, AI-supported environments. It highlights the importance of combining technological innovation with sociocultural awareness, adaptive feedback, and reflective practice when designing professional learning experiences for educators.

Subject of Research: Education

Article Title: Virtual reality helps English teachers strengthen the social side of language

Article References: Virtual reality helps English teachers strengthen the social side of language. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Virtual Reality, Language Education, Pragmatic Competence, Teacher Training, AI in Education, Virtual, reality, helps, English, teachers, strengthen, social

The research team analyzed data from two national surveys involving more than 2,500 U.S. adults who hold investments outside of their retirement accounts. The primary objective was to determine whether the confidence investors reported matched their actual understanding of financial instruments. Participants were first asked to rate their perceived knowledge of investing on a scale from one to seven. Subsequently, they were subjected to a reality check by answering 11 multiple-choice questions covering fundamental investment topics, including stocks, bonds, risk and return, index funds, short selling, and options.

The results revealed a stark contrast between the two groups of investors. Those who relied on social media to guide their investment decisions reported high levels of confidence in their knowledge. However, when tested on basic investment concepts, these individuals struggled to answer questions regarding corporate stocks and short selling. In contrast, participants who obtained their investment information from traditional media sources, such as newspapers, magazines, television, and radio, reported similar levels of confidence but demonstrated significantly higher actual knowledge in the subsequent testing phase.

Xiaoyuan Sun, the first author of the study and a doctoral student in the University of Georgia’s College of Family and Consumer Sciences, noted that while there are many ways to access information today, social media often lacks depth. Sun explained that individuals using these platforms may not understand the underlying mechanics of investments or be able to verify if a specific product is suitable for their financial situation. Swarn Chatterjee, the corresponding author and a professor of financial planning, housing, and consumer economics, summarized the core finding by stating that social media usage increases confidence without necessarily increasing real knowledge.

The survey data also provided insights into the prevalence of social media usage among investors. More than one in four respondents indicated that they used social media for investment information, while approximately one in five relied on it specifically when deciding which stocks to purchase. The study further found that participants who used social media for information tended to trade more frequently than those who preferred traditional media sources. Chatterjee suggested that the fear of missing out, or FOMO, might be a contributing factor to this behavior, as constant exposure to discussions about the next big stock or investment opportunity can create pressure to act quickly.

Despite these risks, the researchers acknowledged that social media platforms like YouTube and Reddit have made financial information more accessible. Chatterjee noted that these platforms are democratizing access to financial knowledge, particularly for individuals who previously found investing intimidating or confusing. However, the study emphasized that easier access does not equate to better or more accurate information. Unlike financial professionals who are bound by rules and regulations, individuals on social media are not subject to the same standards. Consequently, anyone can offer financial opinions, and while short videos and posts may simplify complex topics, important details can be lost in the process.

The study included specific questions to gauge exposure to trending investments, such as whether respondents had ever purchased a “meme stock” or other investments that were trending on social media. It also asked if participants had heard of bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. These questions helped the researchers understand the breadth of topics covered in social media discussions and how they intersect with traditional investment concepts. The findings suggest that the informal nature of social media advice may contribute to a superficial understanding of financial markets, where trends and popularity are prioritized over fundamental analysis.

The researchers are not advocating for investors to abandon social media platforms entirely. Instead, they advise consumers to become more critical of the financial information they encounter online. Chatterjee compared the situation to seeking medical advice on the internet; while online resources can provide initial insights, they should not replace professional consultation for important decisions. He recommended that investors use social media as a sounding board but verify information and seek professional guidance before making major financial commitments. This approach allows individuals to benefit from the accessibility of social media while mitigating the risks associated with unverified advice.

The study underscores the importance of investment knowledge in navigating modern financial markets. Chatterjee emphasized that while social media can be a useful tool for gathering information, it is not a substitute for a solid understanding of financial principles. He urged investors to proceed with caution and to recognize that confidence alone is not a reliable indicator of competence. The findings from this study serve as a reminder that the source of financial information can significantly impact an investor’s decision-making process and overall financial well-being.

Published in the International Journal of Bank Marketing, the study titled “From media exposure to trading behavior: evidence from social media, traditional media and investor knowledge” contributes to the growing body of research on the impact of digital media on financial behavior. The authors hope that their findings will encourage both investors and financial educators to address the gap between perceived and actual knowledge. By promoting a culture of verification and critical thinking, the financial community can help investors make more informed decisions in an era where information is abundant but not always reliable.

Subject of Research: Consumer Finance

Article Title: Social media may make investors feel more confident than they should be

Article References: Social media may make investors feel more confident than they should be. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Investing, Social Media, Financial Literacy, Consumer Behavior, University of Georgia, Social, media, make, investors, feel, confident, than

The research, led by Wonsha Michael Didiso with colleagues Brehanu Borji Ayalewu and Sintayehu Assefa Yirga, arrives at a moment of transformation for Ethiopian finance. The sector has grown rapidly as the National Bank of Ethiopia pushes modernization and opening-up reforms, exposing private banks to intensifying competition, economic uncertainty, and shifting customer expectations. Against this backdrop, the team asked a deceptively simple question: does carefully reading the business environment actually make banks perform better, and if so, how does that information travel from the boardroom to the bottom line?

To answer it, the researchers targeted the entire workforce of Ethiopian private banks, a population of 147,367 employees according to the National Bank of Ethiopia’s 2024/2025 annual report. Using a standard sample-size formula attributed to Kothari, they drew 383 respondents through simple random sampling, distributing structured questionnaires across head offices and district operations in Addis Ababa, Hawassa, and Bahir Dar. The survey was translated into Amharic and independently back-translated into English to eliminate linguistic bias, piloted with 30 bank employees excluded from the main survey, and ultimately returned 375 usable responses, a 98 percent response rate that lends unusual confidence to the dataset.

The methodological machinery behind the analysis is where the study earns its scientific weight. The team employed structural equation modeling, supported by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, to test whether the abstract constructs of environmental scanning, competitive strategy, and organizational performance could be reliably measured and causally linked. Reliability was strong across the board: Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from 0.789 to 0.859 for the seven scanning dimensions, including PESTEL analysis, SWOT analysis, Five Forces analysis, scenario planning, benchmarking, gap analysis, and resource-based view analysis. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy reached 0.960, an exceptionally high score indicating the data were superbly suited for factor analysis.

Model fit statistics told a similarly convincing story. The chi-square to degrees-of-freedom ratio of 2.980 sits just below the conventional threshold of 3, while the Goodness-of-Fit Index, Normed Fit Index, Tucker-Lewis Index, and Comparative Fit Index all exceeded 0.9. The root mean square error of approximation was 0.061, comfortably under the 0.08 cutoff that signals minimal discrepancy between the model’s predictions and the observed data. In plain terms, the statistical architecture of the study held together well enough that its substantive findings deserve serious attention.

Those findings are strikingly consistent. Every one of the seven environmental scanning tools showed a positive and statistically significant effect on organizational performance, with scenario planning and resource-based view analysis posting the strongest coefficients at 0.895 and 0.872 respectively. Environmental scanning as a whole carried a direct effect of 0.36 on bank performance, while its effect on competitive strategy reached 0.894. Competitive strategy itself, spanning cost leadership, differentiation, and focus approaches drawn from Porter’s classic framework, registered the strongest single coefficient in the entire model at 0.914, confirming that how a bank positions itself against rivals is the decisive lever for translating insight into performance.

The mediation analysis revealed the most nuanced result. Competitive strategy partially mediates the relationship between environmental scanning and performance, with an indirect effect of roughly 0.33 layered on top of the direct effect, producing a total effect of about 0.69. Partial mediation means that scanning helps banks in two parallel ways: it improves performance directly, perhaps by enabling faster, better-informed decisions, and it also works through the deliberate construction of competitive strategies that convert environmental intelligence into market advantage. Organizations that scan without strategizing leave much of the value on the table, and organizations that strategize without scanning build on shaky foundations.

The theoretical scaffolding of the study draws on three pillars. Resource-Based Theory holds that durable advantage comes from resources that are valuable, rare, and difficult to imitate, framing environmental scanning capability itself as a strategic asset. Evolutionary theory, in its dynamic capabilities formulation, emphasizes that banks must continuously adapt and reconfigure their resources as the environment shifts, a message especially pertinent for Ethiopian institutions transitioning from manual operations to digital-first models. Porter’s Five Forces supplies the external lens, mapping competitive rivalry, entry threats, substitutes, and the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers onto the scanning agenda.

The practical implications extend beyond Ethiopia’s borders to any emerging-market bank navigating liberalization and digital disruption. The authors argue that banks should embed environmental scanning as a core management function rather than an occasional planning exercise, and that scanning outputs should feed directly into strategy formulation, a process they note many organizations fumble, with prior literature cited in the study suggesting roughly 70 percent of new strategies fail at implementation. For policymakers, the study recommends that regulators require strategic performance measurement systems, such as balanced scorecards linking organizational goals to operational results, with periodic appraisal cycles to enforce alignment and accountability.

The study is candid about its limits. Its cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time rather than tracking how scanning and performance co-evolve, its reliance on self-reported survey data introduces potential bias despite anonymity safeguards, and its focus on Ethiopian private banks constrains generalization to public banks and other national contexts. The authors call for longitudinal designs and multi-group analyses to test how cultural and regulatory environments moderate these relationships. Still, the central message stands firm: in a banking sector where products are increasingly commoditized, the capacity to read the environment and act on it is not a luxury but a measurable driver of survival and success.

Subject of Research: The effect of strategic environmental scanning on private bank performance in Ethiopia through the mediating role of competitive strategy.

Article Title: Effect of strategic environmental scanning on the private bank performance in Ethiopia with mediating role of competitive strategy

Article References: Didiso, W. M., Ayalewu, B. B., & Yirga, S. A. (2026). Effect of strategic environmental scanning on the private bank performance in Ethiopia with mediating role of competitive strategy. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00620-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00620-2

Keywords: strategic environmental scanning, competitive strategy, Ethiopian private banks, organizational performance, structural equation modeling, PESTEL analysis, SWOT analysis, resource-based view, dynamic capabilities, banking sector, Porter's Five Forces, mediation analysis

Tunneling occurs when controlling shareholders exploit their positional advantage to divert assets, profits or business opportunities away from minority investors. Common manifestations include related-party transactions priced to favor the controlling owner, loans and advances extended to affiliates that are never repaid on commercial terms, guarantees issued for the private benefit of connected parties, and outright misappropriation of funds. Because controlling shareholders typically hold voting power disproportionate to their cash-flow rights, the private gains from tunneling can exceed their share of the losses inflicted on the firm, making the practice rational for the dominant owner even as it destroys value for everyone else.

The study measures tunneling primarily through the net level of other receivables that controlling shareholders and their related parties owe to the listed firm, a widely used proxy in Chinese empirical research because misappropriated funds often sit on the balance sheet in this form. The authors construct this measure from firms’ annual reports and combine it with ESG performance scores, allowing them to test statistically whether companies that score higher on environmental, social and governance dimensions exhibit less evidence of resource diversion by their dominant owners.

The empirical findings are consistent: higher ESG performance is associated with significantly lower tunneling by controlling shareholders. The relationship survives a battery of robustness checks, including alternative measures of both ESG performance and tunneling, adjustments for the potential endogeneity of ESG choices, and the use of instrumental-variable and lagged-value strategies to address the concern that causality might run the other way. Firms with stronger ESG profiles, the results suggest, are systematically less likely to see their resources siphoned off by insiders with control.

Why would environmental and social responsibility discipline a controlling shareholder who wants to raid the till? The study identifies several interlocking mechanisms. First, ESG performance functions as a reputational asset. A controlling shareholder contemplating tunneling must weigh the private benefit of diversion against the cost of damaging a hard-won public image of responsible stewardship. Because ESG ratings are increasingly visible to investors, regulators, business partners and international capital, the reputational penalty of exposure rises with the firm’s ESG standing, tipping the cost-benefit calculation away from expropriation.

Second, the information channel matters. High-ESG firms tend to attract greater scrutiny from analysts, institutional investors, media and rating agencies, all of which increase the transparency of corporate transactions and raise the probability that related-party dealings will be detected and challenged. ESG-oriented firms also tend to have stronger internal governance structures, including more independent boards and better internal controls, which directly obstruct the approval and concealment of tunneling transactions. Third, external financing pressure reinforces the effect. Firms that want to tap capital markets on favorable terms, particularly foreign institutional investors who increasingly apply ESG screens, have a concrete financial incentive to protect minority shareholders, and refraining from tunneling is a prerequisite for that credibility.

The research also explores heterogeneity, revealing that the disciplining effect of ESG is not uniform across corporate China. The restraining influence of ESG performance on tunneling is stronger in firms with lower external audit quality, weaker investor protection environments and higher financing constraints, conditions under which the reputational and informational safeguards associated with ESG substitute for other governance mechanisms. State-owned enterprises show different patterns from private firms, reflecting the distinct incentives and political constraints that shape managerial and shareholder behavior in each ownership category. These findings suggest that ESG performance operates as a governance substitute precisely where traditional mechanisms are weakest, a result with clear policy relevance for emerging markets.

The Chinese setting makes the study particularly consequential. China’s capital markets host thousands of listed firms in which a single family, founder or state entity typically retains effective control, while minority shareholders provide much of the capital. The separation between control and cash-flow rights, often amplified through pyramidal structures and cross-holdings, creates fertile ground for expropriation, and Chinese regulators have repeatedly tightened rules on related-party transactions and fund misappropriation. Yet enforcement remains uneven, and the study’s results point to a market-based complement to regulation: if firms can be induced to genuinely improve ESG performance, minority investors gain a partially self-enforcing shield against insider expropriation.

The study carries implications well beyond China. Global investors have poured trillions of dollars into ESG-labelled assets, and critics have questioned whether ESG scores capture anything economically meaningful. This research contributes a concrete answer in one important domain: ESG performance is associated with tangible reductions in a specific, measurable form of corporate misgovernance. For asset managers, the results imply that ESG ratings may convey information about the risk of expropriation in emerging-market holdings that conventional financial analysis can miss. For standard-setters and exchanges, the evidence supports policies that integrate ESG disclosure requirements with related-party transaction oversight, since the two mechanisms appear to operate synergistically.

The authors are careful to frame the findings within their limitations. ESG ratings themselves vary across providers, tunneling can take forms not captured by the receivables proxy, and the Chinese institutional context, with its distinctive ownership structures and regulatory environment, may limit generalization to markets where ownership is dispersed. Still, the central message stands: corporate responsibility performance is not decoration. In the battle between controlling shareholders and the minority investors who fund them, credible environmental, social and governance conduct shifts real resources, reducing the leakage of corporate wealth and strengthening the integrity of emerging capital markets from the inside out.

Subject of Research: The relationship between corporate ESG performance and controlling shareholder tunneling in Chinese listed companies

Article Title: Could corporate ESG performance impacts controlling shareholders tunneling: evidence from China

Article References: Could corporate ESG performance impacts controlling shareholders tunneling: evidence from China. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-08977-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-08977-0

Keywords: ESG performance, tunneling, controlling shareholders, corporate governance, China, listed companies, related-party transactions, minority shareholders, emerging markets, agency problems, misappropriation, state-owned enterprises

The research, published as an open-access article in the Journal of Eating Disorders, addresses a persistent gap in the literature. Most of what scientists know about the psychological effects of image- and video-based platforms has come from English-speaking, non-clinical samples, leaving open the question of whether the same mechanisms operate in other languages and in people who actually meet diagnostic criteria for eating disorders. By systematically translating the Social Media Appearance Preoccupation Scale through a rigorous translation and back-translation procedure and then subjecting it to statistical validation, the team created a tool that German-speaking clinicians and researchers can use to probe these behaviors in their own populations. The work matters because eating disorders carry among the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric illness, and understanding which digital behaviors track with pathology could sharpen both screening and prevention.

The scale itself is built around a three-factor model. The first dimension, Online Self-Presentation, captures the strategic effort people invest in curating how they look on their profiles: selecting, editing, and posting images designed to convey a particular appearance. The second, Appearance-Related Activity, reflects engagement with appearance-focused content more broadly, such as following fitness influencers, viewing beauty tutorials, or spending time on content organized around bodies and looks. The third, Appearance Comparison, measures how frequently users evaluate their own appearance against the appearances they encounter in their feeds. Earlier work with the English version of the scale had linked higher scores on all three dimensions to more intensive social media use, greater anxiety, more depressive symptoms, and more disordered eating, but the relative clinical weight of each dimension had remained uncertain.

In the first study, the researchers administered the German scale to 363 young adults alongside well-established measures of eating disorder pathology, general psychological distress, and problematic internet use. Eating pathology was assessed with the Eating Disorder Examination-Questionnaire 8, a widely used self-report instrument, while psychological distress was measured with the Brief Symptom Inventory-18, whose Global Severity Index summarizes overall symptom burden. Problematic internet use was captured with the Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2, which covers constructs such as preference for online social interaction, mood regulation through the internet, cognitive preoccupation, compulsive use, and negative outcomes. Confirmatory factor analysis, using the weighted least squares mean and variance adjusted estimator appropriate for ordinal questionnaire data, showed that the three-factor structure of the German version fit the data acceptably well, mirroring the architecture of the original instrument.

The psychometric performance of the translated scale was strong. All three subscales exhibited good internal consistency, with omega coefficients ranging from 0.83 to 0.88, indicating that the items within each dimension reliably measured a common underlying construct. Fit indices commonly used in structural equation modeling, including the root mean square error of approximation, the standardized root mean square residual, and the comparative and Tucker-Lewis fit indices, fell within acceptable ranges once a small number of residual covariances were modeled. In practical terms, this means German-speaking researchers now have a validated shortcut to a construct that previously had to be assessed with instruments developed for entirely different linguistic and cultural contexts, a step that should accelerate appearance-focused social media research in the German-speaking world.

The pattern of associations across the validation battery was especially informative. While all three dimensions correlated with eating disorder pathology, general distress, and problematic internet use to some degree, Appearance Comparison showed the most robust and most consistent relationships. People who reported frequently comparing their looks to others online tended to score higher on disordered eating symptoms, reported greater overall psychological distress, and displayed more problematic patterns of internet use, including using the internet to regulate mood and experiencing negative consequences from their online habits. Online Self-Presentation and Appearance-Related Activity also related to these outcomes, but their associations were weaker and less uniform, suggesting that these behaviors, although common, may be less specifically implicated in the chain linking social media to body dissatisfaction and eating pathology.

The second study moved the question into the clinic. The researchers compared 21 outpatients with diagnosed eating disorders to 37 healthy controls using multivariate analysis of variance, examining whether the groups differed across the three SMAPS dimensions. The clinical group scored higher on appearance comparison, and this difference was statistically significant, with p equal to .004 and a partial eta squared of 0.14, a medium-to-large effect size with a 90 percent confidence interval of 0.03 to 0.29. In plain terms, the tendency to compare one’s appearance to others online was markedly elevated in people with eating disorders relative to people without them, even in a modestly sized sample. No other demographic or usage variable in the analysis achieved the same discriminatory clarity, which strengthens the argument that appearance comparison is not merely a byproduct of heavy platform use but a behavior with genuine clinical relevance.

These findings dovetail with influential theoretical models of body image disturbance, which posit that appearance-based social comparison and self-focused attention act as conduits through which media exposure translates into body dissatisfaction and, ultimately, disordered eating. Image- and video-based platforms supply an effectively endless stream of curated, filtered, and algorithmically optimized faces and bodies, creating comparison opportunities at a scale and intensity that earlier media environments never approached. The new data suggest that measuring total screen time misses the point: two users can spend identical hours on the same platforms, yet only the one who repeatedly asks how her body measures up against what she sees may be traveling down the pathway toward pathology. Screening tools that capture this specific behavior could therefore identify at-risk individuals that usage-based metrics overlook.

The authors caution that the studies are cross-sectional, so they cannot establish whether appearance comparison drives eating disorder symptoms, results from them, or, perhaps most plausibly, participates in a self-reinforcing loop in which distress fuels comparison and comparison deepens distress. The clinical sample in Study 2 was small, and the outpatient group was diagnostically heterogeneous, so larger and more diagnostically specific samples will be needed to confirm the group differences and test whether the pattern holds across anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and related conditions. Longitudinal designs and intervention studies, for example those that reduce comparison opportunities or teach users to recognize and resist comparison impulses, represent the logical next steps. Still, the message for clinicians, educators, and parents is concrete: the question is not only how long young people spend on social media, but what they do while they are there. When the time online is organized around comparing bodies, the psychological stakes appear to rise considerably, and that behavior is now measurable in German with a reliable, validated instrument.

Subject of Research: Validation of the German Social Media Appearance Preoccupation Scale and its links between appearance-related social media behaviors and eating disorder pathology.

Article Title: Appearance-related social media behavior and eating disorder pathology: evidence from the german social media appearance preoccupation scale in nonclinical and clinical samples

Article References: Brand, S., Kappelt, I., Kloberdanz, K., Zimmer-Gembeck, M. J., & Jungmann, S. M. (2026). Appearance-related social media behavior and eating disorder pathology: evidence from the german social media appearance preoccupation scale in nonclinical and clinical samples. Journal of Eating Disorders, 14(1), Article 211. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40337-026-01762-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40337-026-01762-z

Keywords: social media, body image, eating disorders, appearance comparison, scale validation, online self-presentation, disordered eating, psychological distress, problematic internet use, German validation, Appearance-related, social

The quantitative trajectory is striking. Between 2018 and 2020, scientific production in this domain was minimal, with only three to nine publications each year, reflecting the early and fragmented stage of scholarly engagement with the topic. From 2021 to 2023, output climbed progressively from 13 to 44 papers, a period coinciding with the rising prominence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, accelerating regulatory development, and the post-pandemic digitalization of financial systems. The field then underwent a dramatic acceleration: publications reached 101 in 2024 and surged to 186 in 2025. Citation activity followed the same curve, with the analyzed dataset accumulating 8,820 citations in total, including 4,307 recorded during 2025 alone. The authors caution, however, that this late surge may partly reflect indexing dynamics and database update cycles, and they warn that the concentration of recent output introduces a recency bias that must temper any interpretation of bibliometric patterns.

Methodologically, the study is notable for its transparent and reproducible design. The researchers retrieved data from Scopus, chosen for its comprehensive coverage of interdisciplinary journals in finance, economics, environmental science, and information systems, together with its structured metadata and compatibility with VOSviewer. Rather than relying on a single narrow term, they constructed an inclusive, concept-driven search query incorporating synonyms and lexical variations—terms such as “fintech,” “digital finance,” “green fintech,” “sustainable finance,” “green finance,” “climate finance,” “ESG,” and “financial innovation”—to reduce terminology bias. A PRISMA-inspired screening process began with 720 identified records, which were filtered by publication period, document type, subject area, and language, and then screened by title, abstract, and keywords, ultimately yielding a final corpus of 384 English-language journal articles. Sensitivity analyses using alternative occurrence thresholds of two and five confirmed that the resulting cluster structures were stable and not artifacts of parameter choices, strengthening the reliability of the mapping.

The disciplinary composition of the corpus underscores the field’s deeply interdisciplinary character. Economics, econometrics, and finance dominate with 186 publications, confirming that financial mechanisms remain central to the analysis. These are complemented by substantial contributions from the social sciences (147 publications), environmental science (138), and business, management, and accounting (119), reflecting the growing integration of ESG considerations and societal impacts into financial decision-making. The presence of energy research (77 publications) highlights the close relationship between sustainable finance and the low-carbon energy transition, while computer science (58) and engineering (28) illustrate how artificial intelligence, blockchain, and data analytics are being embedded within financial applications. Yet the authors note a potential imbalance: technological and environmental perspectives remain under-integrated relative to the dominance of finance-oriented inquiry, suggesting the need for genuinely interdisciplinary approaches that combine financial modeling with technological and environmental expertise.

Geographically, the analysis reveals a strikingly concentrated knowledge landscape. China leads decisively with 162 publications—more than four times the output of any other nation—a dominance the authors attribute to the country’s strategic emphasis on digital transformation, FinTech development, and sustainable finance policy. A second tier of contributors includes India (37), the United Kingdom (33), Malaysia (31), Pakistan (31), and Saudi Arabia (30), demonstrating the growing role of emerging and developing economies in this research space. By contrast, traditionally powerful research hubs such as the United States (21) and major European economies—France and Spain with 13 each, Italy with 12, and Germany with 9—show comparatively modest output in this specific domain. The authors argue this geographical imbalance may limit the generalizability of research findings and underscore the need for stronger international collaboration and more inclusive research frameworks capable of capturing diverse economic, regulatory, and technological contexts.

At the heart of the study lies a keyword co-occurrence analysis that identified five coherent thematic clusters, each representing a distinct but interconnected research stream. The first cluster addresses the macroeconomic and environmental foundations of sustainable finance, encompassing economic growth, ecological footprint, natural resource management, and environmental policy, with a strong empirical orientation reflected in econometric techniques such as regression analysis and autoregressive models. The second cluster centers on climate finance and the energy transition, focusing on renewable energy, carbon emissions, energy efficiency, and the financial mechanisms needed to direct capital toward low-carbon, climate-resilient investments. Together, these two clusters establish the environmental and economic bedrock upon which the rest of the field has been constructed.

The remaining clusters chart the field’s technological turn. The third cluster represents the core of the FinTech–sustainable finance nexus, integrating artificial intelligence, banking, financial inclusion, financial innovation, green finance, and governance—a configuration suggesting that digital innovation is increasingly viewed as a tool for expanding access to finance, reducing information asymmetries, and supporting sustainable investment allocation through mechanisms the authors connect to stakeholder and agency theory. The fourth cluster emphasizes digital finance, green innovation, and data-driven empirical methods such as panel data and spatiotemporal analysis, with a pronounced focus on China and India as laboratories for studying how digital transformation shapes green technology innovation in rapidly developing economies. The fifth, smaller cluster captures the emerging frontier of decentralized finance, the green economy, and blockchain-based systems that may create alternative channels for transparent and sustainable capital allocation. Co-citation analysis further revealed the field’s intellectual foundations, with scholars such as M. Hashem Pesaran, Farhad Taghizadeh-Hesary, and others occupying central network positions, indicating that current research remains grounded in established econometric, green finance, and energy economics traditions.

Despite the field’s explosive growth, the study identifies persistent structural weaknesses. Integration between technological innovation, financial systems, and sustainability frameworks remains fragmented and uneven, with environmental economics and technological research often conducted in isolation rather than within unified analytical frameworks. Governance, regulation, and risk management are conspicuously underrepresented across all clusters, even though recent evidence from global banking institutions shows that green innovation, board expertise, and governance quality are crucial in translating digital financial innovation into sustainable outcomes. The literature also exhibits methodological narrowness, relying heavily on econometric and cross-sectional approaches while advanced machine learning techniques, causal inference designs, and large-scale real-world datasets remain underdeveloped. Longitudinal evidence on the long-term effects of FinTech-driven systems on environmental sustainability, economic resilience, and social development is scarce, leaving the field in what the authors describe as a phase of conceptual expansion without full theoretical integration and empirical consolidation.

Beyond mapping the mainstream, the study highlights emerging frontiers that may reshape the field. Decentralized finance, blockchain, and tokenized green assets appear as nascent but strategically important topics, raising urgent questions about transparency, accountability, cybersecurity, financial stability, and regulatory compliance. A further underexplored dimension involves the convergence of Islamic and ethical finance with FinTech-enabled sustainability transitions, including Shariah-compliant instruments such as green Sukuk and Islamic digital banking platforms, which share with sustainable finance an emphasis on ethical investment, risk sharing, and long-term value creation. The authors note that countries such as Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates are already investing heavily in both sustainable finance and digital financial innovation, positioning Islamic FinTech as a potentially significant contributor to more inclusive and socially responsible financial ecosystems.

The implications of the study extend well beyond academia. For financial institutions, the findings emphasize the need to deepen ESG integration through digital tools that improve data transparency, risk assessment, and capital allocation efficiency. For policymakers, the results highlight the urgency of developing regulatory frameworks that balance innovation with financial stability and environmental accountability, particularly as decentralized technologies proliferate faster than the governance structures meant to oversee them. The authors call for future research built on longitudinal designs, comparative cross-country analyses spanning developed and emerging economies, governance-oriented investigations of board expertise and institutional effectiveness, and sophisticated empirical methodologies including AI-based prediction models and causal inference approaches. While the FinTech–sustainable finance nexus is undeniably evolving toward a more integrated, technology-driven paradigm, the study concludes that the field still requires deeper theoretical and empirical development before digital financial innovation can be said to reliably serve the goal of sustainable financial systems.

The study emerges from the Social Prescribing in Sweden project, known as SPiS, a research initiative led from Umeå University that has pioneered the testing of social prescribing in Swedish primary care. Social prescribing, an approach that has gained global interest over the past decade, connects patients to non-medical community resources in line with their individual needs, ranging from simple signposting to intensive, personalized support. Unlike the English model, where dedicated link workers carry out the process, the Swedish model embeds the prescriber role within existing primary care staff, and at many participating centers occupational therapists took on this role as an extension of their daily work. The model itself, co-developed with healthcare providers and municipalities starting in 2018 and grounded in the Person-Environment-Occupation-Performance framework, follows a structured four-step process: screening, assessment, prescription, and follow-up.

The mechanics of the model are deceptively simple. All clinical staff at participating primary care centers ask every client aged 65 or older a standardized question: “Are you troubled by loneliness?” Those who confirm loneliness and express interest are referred internally to a social prescriber, often an occupational therapist, who conducts an in-depth assessment of the client’s daily life, needs, and interests. The assessment covers preferences for group size, timing, frequency, whether activities should be online or in person, and any activities the person wishes to avoid. From this, the prescriber and client develop an activity profile, and a physical paper prescription is written for a specific ongoing social activity in the local community, complete with participation goals and follow-up dates. A telephone follow-up occurs three weeks later, and a face-to-face review follows at three months, allowing adjustments to be made.

To understand how this plays out in practice, the research team conducted semi-structured digital interviews with ten occupational therapists, all women, working in urban and rural centers across Sweden, with clinical experience ranging from two to fourteen years in primary care. The interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, and preliminary findings were shared with the informants in a member-checking process to strengthen the credibility of the conclusions. The analysis produced three overarching themes that together paint a nuanced picture of a profession discovering both a natural fit and a difficult boundary.

The first theme, captured in an informant’s remark that “it is a part of our basics, actually,” reflects how strongly the model aligns with occupational therapy’s core values of activity, participation, and meaningfulness. The therapists described how social life had long hovered in the background of their client interactions without ever being actively addressed; the model made this implicit focus explicit. They saw themselves as uniquely trained for the assessment step, drawing on their holistic view of activity, person, and environment. As one informant put it, it is easy for someone else to suggest playing pétanque, but that suggestion may fail entirely if functional limitations, environmental barriers, and the individual’s broader life situation are not all taken into account. This multidimensional assessment expertise, the informants argued, is what distinguishes occupational therapists from other health professions and enables genuinely tailored prescriptions.

The second theme, however, exposes the friction of turning professional philosophy into everyday practice: the challenge of matching individual assessments with a fragmented and often sparse supply of local social activities. Therapists described hunting for activity information on poorly updated websites and outdated contact lists as a kind of “detective work” that consumed time they did not have in resource-strained primary care settings governed by efficiency norms. One informant lamented the difficulty of being “the spider in the web” who keeps track of everything available. In rural areas, the scarcity of options was so acute that some therapists hesitated to initiate the process at all, and some older adults had misunderstood the model, expecting primary care to create new activities specifically for them rather than matching them to existing ones.

Beneath these practical hurdles lay a deeper emotional burden: the fear of letting lonely older adults down. Several informants worried about raising false hopes, with one confessing she was afraid clients might “feel even more lonely after they have met me.” Others cautioned that recommending a social activity carries real risk, since some contacts and settings could prove bad for a vulnerable person, echoing what the literature calls the dark side of occupation. Interestingly, some therapists resolved this pressure by reframing their role from expert to facilitator, sitting down with clients at the computer and searching together, which transformed prescription-writing into a collaborative, brainstorming process and dissolved the myth of the perfect match. Others coped by partnering with municipalities and civil society organizations to maintain continuously updated activity folders at their centers.

The third theme addressed the gap between receiving a prescription and actually participating. The therapists emphasized that loneliness is not a quick fix and that a prescription for dancing, for example, only becomes meaningful when the barriers preventing the client from dancing are addressed as part of the prescription itself. Support could take many forms: prescribing an electric wheelchair to enable mobility, offering motivational and emotional support for clients anxious about group settings, arranging transportation, recruiting companions for first visits, and mobilizing the client’s own informal networks of relatives and neighbors. At the same time, the informants warned against overextending the role, describing loneliness as “a big deep pit” and stressing the need for clear boundaries, since taking on too much within current primary care resources could leave prescribers feeling swallowed by the complexity of the task.

The study’s conclusions carry weight for health systems far beyond Sweden. The authors argue that occupational therapists are, in many ways, well positioned to contribute meaningfully to social prescribing, and that the approach may even strengthen the profession by refocusing attention on foundational values of meaningful activity and social connectedness that biomedical and market-driven healthcare models have pushed aside. But realizing the model’s potential, they conclude, requires acknowledging the true complexity of loneliness and social activities, lowering thresholds for social participation, and fostering collaboration across organizational and professional boundaries. In a world where loneliness is now recognized by the World Health Organization as a global health concern, the Swedish experience suggests that the prescription pad may need a second column, one written not for pills, but for people, places, and shared purpose.

Subject of Research: Occupational Therapists as Social Prescribers: Insights from Swedish Primary Care

Article Title: Occupational Therapists as Social Prescribers: Insights from Swedish Primary Care

Article References: Viklund, E. W., Degerstedt, F., Jonsson, F., Lundgren, A. S., & Nilsson, I. (2026). Occupational Therapists as Social Prescribers: Insights from Swedish Primary Care. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 33(1), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44474-026-00002-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44474-026-00002-6

Keywords: Occupational, Therapists, Social, Prescribers, Insights, Swedish, Primary, Care, scientific research

ESG investing has expanded rapidly over the past decade, making sustainability assessments increasingly influential in financial decision-making. Environmental scores may reflect issues such as emissions, resource use and climate exposure; social measures can include labour practices, product safety and community relations; and governance assessments often examine board structures, executive accountability, shareholder rights and corporate transparency. Investors use these indicators to estimate risks that may not be immediately visible in traditional financial statements. A falling ESG rating can therefore be interpreted as a warning about regulatory penalties, reputational damage, operational disruption or future costs. Previous research has linked ESG deterioration with declining share prices, but the Murdoch study addresses an important question: why does the market punish some downgrades far more aggressively than others?

Led by Dr Phu Ngoc Tran, a Lecturer at the Murdoch Business School, the research team examined ESG rating changes among companies in the S&P 500 between 2010 and 2024. The dataset contained more than 6,700 ESG rating events, allowing the researchers to compare market reactions across a large group of major publicly traded companies and over a substantial period of changing investor attitudes. Rather than treating every rating adjustment as equivalent, the study connected each event with information about how investors had been discussing and evaluating the company beforehand. This approach enabled the researchers to investigate whether the market’s reaction to a downgrade was shaped by expectations that had already been formed through news coverage, public commentary and social media activity.

To measure those expectations, the researchers used company-specific news and social media data to construct a multidimensional picture of investor sentiment. Instead of reducing sentiment to a single positive-or-negative score, they separated it into five categories: positive sentiment, negative sentiment, risk-related sentiment, volatility-related sentiment and management-related sentiment. This distinction is technically important because different forms of sentiment may influence trading in different ways. Positive sentiment can represent confidence in a company’s growth, strategy or reputation, while risk sentiment may reflect concern about uncertainty or potential losses. Management sentiment can focus on executive decisions and leadership quality, whereas volatility sentiment may signal expectations of unstable price movements. By examining these dimensions separately, the researchers could test which type of investor outlook most strongly altered the consequences of an ESG downgrade.

The central finding was that positive investor sentiment had the strongest influence on the market’s response. ESG downgrades were associated with substantially larger share-price losses when they followed a period in which investors had expressed unusually optimistic views about the company. In this setting, the downgrade represented a negative surprise. Investors who had expected a firm to maintain strong performance, responsible conduct or sustainability leadership suddenly had to revise their assumptions. That process, known in financial economics as expectation revision, can lead to rapid repricing as market participants reassess the company’s future cash flows, risk exposure and reputation. The study indicates that optimism can therefore create a form of vulnerability: the more confidence investors place in a company’s overall story, the more damaging a contradictory ESG signal may become.

The result was more pronounced than the influence of fear, risk concerns, volatility or negative views about management, according to co-author Dr Ariful Hoque of the Murdoch Business School. This does not mean that investors ignore those other forms of sentiment. Rather, the findings suggest that a downgrade has a distinctive psychological and financial effect when it breaks through an established positive narrative. A firm that is already viewed negatively may have less reputational value left to lose, and a new ESG concern may confirm what investors already suspect. By contrast, a company surrounded by positive expectations may experience a sharper shock because the downgrade forces investors to question the reliability of earlier signals. The market reaction may consequently reflect not only the rating change itself, but also the collapse of confidence that had accumulated beforehand.

The researchers also found that the effect was strongest among larger companies and firms with strong ESG track records. Large corporations generally attract more analyst coverage, media attention, institutional investment and social media discussion, creating conditions in which new information can spread quickly and influence many traders at once. Their size can also increase the financial consequences of ESG controversies because these companies operate across more markets, employ larger workforces and face greater scrutiny from regulators, consumers and investors. A strong ESG reputation raises expectations further. Companies that have consistently presented themselves as sustainability leaders may be judged against a higher standard, so even a single downgrade can appear especially inconsistent with their public identity. In financial markets, reputational capital can function as an asset, but the study suggests that it can also increase the potential cost of disappointment.

For corporate leaders, the findings offer a warning against treating ESG performance as a communications exercise separate from financial risk management. A strong sustainability reputation may support investor confidence, but it also creates an expectation that the company will continue to meet demanding environmental, social and governance standards. If performance weakens, delayed disclosure, unclear explanations or a perceived gap between public commitments and actual practices could magnify the reaction. Companies may therefore need to monitor ESG indicators continuously, improve the quality of sustainability reporting and communicate promptly when material problems emerge. Protecting investor trust requires more than publishing ambitious targets; it depends on demonstrating that those targets are supported by measurable progress, credible oversight and consistent operational decisions.

The results also have implications for investors, who may benefit from considering ESG rating changes alongside the sentiment conditions surrounding a company. A downgrade should not automatically be interpreted as having the same significance in every case. Its impact may depend on the firm’s previous reputation, the strength of investor optimism, the amount of attention focused on the company and the extent to which the new information contradicts market expectations. The study does not suggest that positive sentiment is inherently irrational or that ESG ratings alone determine future returns. Instead, it shows that market reactions are conditional and can be amplified when new information conflicts with an established narrative. The paper, titled “Which investor sentiment drives the ESG–return link? A multi-dimensional sentiment perspective on ESG changes,” was co-authored by Dr Thi Le and published in the International Review of Economics & Finance. Its broader message is that sustainability information becomes most financially powerful when it changes what investors thought they already knew.

Subject of Research: People; investors and publicly traded companies

Article Title: Which investor sentiment drives the ESG–return link? A multi-dimensional sentiment perspective on ESG changes

Web References: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105905602600643X?via%3Dihub

References: Tran, Phu Ngoc, Ariful Hoque, and Thi Le, “Which investor sentiment drives the ESG–return link? A multi-dimensional sentiment perspective on ESG changes,” International Review of Economics & Finance, DOI: 10.1016/j.iref.2026.105530

Keywords: ESG investing, environmental social and governance ratings, investor sentiment, stock markets, share prices, corporate reputation, financial economics, sustainability, S&P 500, market risk

Using an AI-powered approach, researchers from LMU Munich and the University of Cologne analyzed 2.9 million sustainability-related indicators found in ten years of corporate reporting. The dataset spans the annual and sustainability reports of 600 of Europe’s largest listed companies, covering 2014–2023.

In total, the team reviewed roughly 9,000 PDF documents comprising about 1.7 million pages. The period was chosen to predate the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), meaning companies were mostly reporting under earlier rules.

To measure what would look like CSRD-aligned transparency, the researchers applied the stricter CSRD disclosure requirements retrospectively. Their method evaluated reporting coverage across environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics by scanning for 501 defined indicators.

The analysis was conducted with a large language model—Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct—which automatically extracted and classified ESG signals from long-form texts. “Instead of relying on a few costly commercial datasets with inconsistent definitions, we can systematically track what companies actually report,” the authors note.

Results show a steep improvement in disclosure volume: the average number of reported indicators rose by 52.4% from 2014 to 2023. Companies with weaker sustainability performance also narrowed the gap, with reported indicator shortfalls shrinking from 39.4% to 6.8%, suggesting transparency is converging across firms.

But performance signals don’t tell a uniformly reassuring tale. Reported direct emissions declined substantially, while reported indirect value-chain emissions increased more than fivefold—largely because firms are now capturing and publishing more categories rather than necessarily cutting more emissions.

On social metrics, progress is also mixed. Representation of women in top management rose by 9.2 percentage points, while the gap between executive compensation and median employee wages expanded dramatically—more than twelvefold since 2014.

The researchers are releasing their dataset and code through the Sustainability Reporting Navigator open science initiative, aiming to help regulators, investors, and NGOs compare firms more consistently and spot transparency gaps.

Subject of Research: Assessing corporate sustainability disclosure and performance using large language models across ESG indicators.
Article Title: Assessing corporate sustainability with large language models: evidence from Europe
News Publication Date: 7-Jul-2026
Web References: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-75160-z
References: Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-75160-z)
Image Credits:
Keywords: corporate sustainability reporting, CSRD, ESG disclosure, climate data, value chain emissions, large language models, transparency gaps, AI text mining