The energy trilemma is a significant challenge of our time, driven by advancing climate change, social and political changes, and the impact of the war in Ukraine. This has led to the traditional business models of the energy industry and utilities being challenged. Against the backdrop of environmental sustainability, energy security, and affordability, this paper examines whether German utilities can achieve greater sustainability while creating shareholder value by divesting their carbon-intensive businesses. The analysis of the spin-off of E.ON-Uniper and the carve-out of RWE-Innogy reveals positive impacts on shareholder value, corporate performance, and a higher share price of all four companies after the splits. One conclusion that can be drawn is that divesting carbon-intensive businesses might create value for the company and its shareholders. However, it is important to note that the analysis did not demonstrate any benefits in terms of improved ESG ratings due to divestment.

Research & Development (R&D) expenditures and technological development and innovation are crucial for higher and sustainable economic growth of countries. This paper aimed to study the effects of R&D expenditures and high-tech product exports on economic growth rates. Vector autoregressive model (VAR) analysis was made using annual data between 2000-2021 in sampled BRICS countries and Turkey. It was determined that a country's economic growth rates significantly affected R&D expenditures. In addition, R&D expenditures and high-tech exports had no significant effect on economic growth rates. With economic development, the R&D expenditures increased, which was in line with expected results.

(1) Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the relationship between Sustainability Reporting (SR) and financial performance and put forward the effect of the SR on financial performance. (2) Methodology: In order to test our hypothesis that financial performance increases the likelihood of firms reporting sustainability, a regression model was built based on the data of firms included in the Borsa Istanbul Stock Market Sustainability Index. Independent variables included in the model are Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE) values, which are considered as financial performance indicators. Application of sustainable report is a dependent variable of the model. (3) Results: Company size had a positive effect on sustainability activities, while profitability had no significant effect. Large firms were usually more willing to play a role in social and environmental issues and explain their strategies on these issues. (4) Conclusions: It is important for firms to implement sustainability initiatives inside the firms from a strategic point of view, not as a result of pressure from stakeholders, such as official institutions, non-governmental organizations, suppliers or consumers. (5) Implications: With the linear regression estimation performed, the causal relationship between sustainability and financial performance has quantitatively demonstrated the positive effect of sustainability on financial performance. The main purpose of the study is to reveal the importance of publishing a sustainability report for firms and raise their awareness, thus examining the long-term effects of publishing the report. It is suggested that future research may investigate possible differences of sustainability according to the development levels of markets and countries.

This paper aimed to analyze the salary bargaining power of employees and firms. Based on two-tier stochastic frontier model, this paper constructed a model to measure the bargaining power of employees and firms in the salary formation process. Taking Chinese A-share listed companies from 2017 to 2021 in the China Stock Market & Accounting Research Database (CSMAR) of GTA as samples, this paper conducted an empirical measurement of the bargaining power of both parties and the impact on employee salary. The results showed that: (1) The bargaining power of both employees and firms had a very important impact on the final salary, and employees had stronger bargaining power compared with firms; (2) About 75% employees made their salary higher than “Benchmark” salary through bargaining. The employee salary was 8.46% higher than "Benchmark" salary on average. With the increase of salary level, employees had stronger bargaining power in the process of salary formation. (3) The bargaining power of employees and firms was heterogeneous in firms with different ownership in different years, but the bargaining power of employees was generally stronger than that of firms.

As a major public health emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic has some uncertainties. Coupling of the uncertainties and anti-epidemic policies easily leads to the spread of negative emotions. It is challenging to maintain the sustainability of anti-epidemic measures. Therefore, this paper aimed to analyze the challenges that the sustainability of anti-epidemic measures is faced with. A topic clustering extension method was proposed, which integrated Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic information with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) contextual information through aspect-based sentiment analysis. In addition, this paper constructed a thesaurus of aspect words from the two stages of dynamic zero-COVID and orderly relaxation of epidemic control. This paper established the BERT-pair-ABSA model for semantic expansion of auxiliary sentences and calculated sentiment polarity to gain insight into the changes in netizens' concerns, emotional states and evolution trends at different stages. The research results showed: (1) Compared with the benchmark model, the proposed sentiment analysis model had better classification accuracy and was applicable to the sentiment classification of short texts in the epidemic situation; (2) During the dynamic zero-COVID stage, netizens paid attention to grassroots epidemic management and the scope of lockdown and epidemic control, which were closely related to both specific lockdown and control management, and the implementation of regional epidemic management; and (3) in the orderly relaxation stage of epidemic control, netizens were concerned about drug guarantee, medical care guarantee, personal health protection and health protection of special population groups, and negative emotions always dominated in drug guarantee, medical care guarantee and health protection of special groups. The negative sentiment of drug guarantee, medical care guarantee and health protection of special groups always dominated. The results provided an empirical basis for the optimization and adjustment of the anti-epidemic policies.