Featured research

Abstract:

We employ Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze how climate change is discussed in the annual sustainability reports of the 35 largest EU banks (2015–2021), assessing alignment with four societal expectations: decarbonizing financial products and services, addressing climate-related risks, reducing operational emissions, and enhancing transparency. These expectations stem from governments, regulators, and civil society. Analyzing over 1.5 million statements, we find that about 7% of content pertains to climate change. Banks increasingly focus on decarbonizing consumer products and their own operations, but devote less attention to financed emissions, transition risks, and concrete commitments. Our study contributes to the application of NLP in climate finance by qualitatively interpreting how banks, in their own words, engage with societal expectations around the climate transition. This complements quantitative studies by contextualizing disclosure patterns and highlighting reporting gaps and under-emphasized but material issues, offering insights that can inform policymakers in designing disclosure requirements.

Abstract:

This paper examines the integration of sustainability in higher education, focusing on how business, economics, and finance students relate their work to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We develop SustainSight, an inference engine using natural language processing to assess sustainability content in written text. Using SustainSight, we analyze over 23,000 bachelor’s and master’s theses from the five largest Swedish universities offering programs in business, economics, and finance spanning a 15-year period. This unique dataset allows us to provide insights into how sustainability is reflected in students’ theses, with a focus on variation by gender, education level (bachelor/master), discipline, and university. For the subset of theses, for which we have the authors educational program and data on curriculum reforms, a staggered difference-in-differences model is estimated. We find that integration of sustainability into degree requirement substantially increases the likelihood that students include sustainability perspectives into their theses. Finally, we conduct a topic analysis to explore in greater depth what students write about when addressing sustainability-related issues.

Abstract:

Does exposure to business and economics education make students less prosocial and more selfish? Employing a difference-in-difference strategy with panel-data from three subsequent cohorts of students enrolled in a Business and Economics bachelor's program (>900 students), we find that business and economics students become less prosocial over time relative to a control group of comparable students. Importantly, younger students appear to be significantly more malleable with respect to their to prosocial values. Furthermore, we observe heterogeneous effects across majors such as accounting, finance, and economics. Our research demonstrates a strong correlation between prosocial values and generous behavior.

Abstract:

This paper applies computational linguistics learning methods to the banking industry and climate change fields. We introduce our data-driven framework, climateBUG, with the aim of detecting latent information about how banks discuss their activities related to climate change using natural language processing (NLP). This framework consists of an ingestion pipeline, a configurable database, and a set of API’s. In addition, climateBUG offers two standalone components, namely a unique annotated corpus of approximately 1.1M statements from EU banks’ annual and sustainability reporting and a deep learning model adapted to the semantics of the corpus. When benchmarking on classification performance, our model outperforms other models with similar scopes due to its stronger domain relevance. We also provide examples of how the framework can be applied from a user perspective.

Abstract:

Major banks are facing increased public pressure to reduce financing for fossil fuel projects. In this decade of action for the UN Sustainable Development Goals (with a focus on SDG 13 – climate action), all sectors, including the financial sector, are urged to recognize the ways in which they impact these goals and how they can best contribute to their realization. But how are the top 10 most active banks in financing the fossil fuel industry responding to this pressure? Using qualitative textual analysis of these banks’ annual reports and a proposed categorization of how banks are talking about climate change, we highlight how these banks see their role in reducing climate impacts through their financing and whether their response has evolved since the Paris Agreement. We find that while these banks are stating an increasing number of climate change actions since the introduction of the Paris Agreement, there are few clear commitments in relation to their financing of fossil fuels. This absence of commitments in the annual reports may reflect an absence of critical reflection on their responsibility for financing climate change.