ESG Reporting Quality Assessment in Listed Companies of Maritime Sector

Regulatory obligations and market trends connected to environmental sustainability have lately intensified their effect on the shipping industry. New standards are continuously being established, such as the IMO\u27s 2050 aim of lowering greenhouse gas emissions by 50% compared to 2008 levels. These rules have an impact on capital markets and investor decisions about how to fund the maritime transport sector. The standards now include Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) components. These components are not only concerned with the environmental impact of shipping, but also with the social and governance dimensions of those firms that are typically associated with maritime transport risks, such as accidents, ship reservations, pollution issues, and so on. Considering the particular peculiarities of the maritime transport sector, our previous research has resulted in the development of a unified ESG reporting framework customized to shipping. To do this, the authors evaluated shipping related ESG reports and extracted essential ESG variables and methodological frameworks from them. The present study conducts a quality assessment of existing ESG reporting in various sectors of maritime transport companies on a large sample of firms listed at major stock exchanges, while it also identifies the level of compliance and areas for improvement. Based on a comprehensive methodological framework for reporting and assessing ESG for shipping, the research delivers relevant and robust information to aid management decision making, stakeholders, and debtholders insight on firm\u27s sustainability

So what do we really mean when we say that systems biology is holistic?

Background: An old debate has undergone a resurgence in systems biology: that of reductionism versus holism. At least 35 articles in the systems biology literature since 2003 have touched on this issue. The histories of holism and reductionism in the philosophy of biology are reviewed, and the current debate in systems biology is placed in context. Results: Inter-theoretic reductionism in the strict sense envisaged by its creators from the 1930s to the 1960s is largely impractical in biology, and was effectively abandoned by the early 1970s in favour of a more piecemeal approach using individual reductive explanations. Classical holism was a stillborn theory of the 1920s, but the term survived in several fields as a loose umbrella designation for various kinds of anti-reductionism which often differ markedly. Several of these different anti-reductionisms are on display in the holistic rhetoric of the recent systems biology literature. This debate also coincides with a time when interesting arguments are being proposed within the philosophy of biology for a new kind of reductionism. Conclusions: Engaging more deeply with these issues should sharpen our ideas concerning the philosophy of systems biology and its future best methodology. As with previous decisive moments in the history of biology, only those theories that immediately suggest relatively easy experiments will be winners

Dynamic volatility and external security related shocks: The case of the Athens Stock Exchange

This paper analyses the impact of exogenous national security related shocks on the time-varying volatility structure of the Greek stock market. Alternative autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic models are estimated, in order to identify the best fit that adequately describes return volatility behavior, testing symmetric as well as asymmetric innovation responses. An external national security related shock factor is included as well as a military crisis dummy, in order to depict possible implications for the conditional variance. The empirical findings appear to support a statistically significant impact of both national security related factors on the Athens stock market returns. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Dynamic volatility and external security related shocks: The case of the Athens Stock Exchange

This paper analyses the impact of exogenous national security related shocks on the time-varying volatility structure of the Greek stock market. Alternative autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic models are estimated, in order to identify the best fit that adequately describes return volatility behavior, testing symmetric as well as asymmetric innovation responses. An external national security related shock factor is included as well as a military crisis dummy, in order to depict possible implications for the conditional variance. The empirical findings appear to support a statistically significant impact of both national security related factors on the Athens stock market returns. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved