IV International Annual Conference 'ESG Corporate Dynamics: the Challenges for Emerging Capital Markets'

The School of Finance invites to participate in the IV International Annual Conference 'ESG Corporate Dynamics: the Challenges for Emerging Capital Markets' on 27-28 November 2026 at the HSE Moscow campus.

We aim to create an effective and regular forum for worldwide academic exchange of research in the area of ESG transformation of companies in greater BRICS and other emerging capital markets. We aim to push forward the discussions on the impact of global ESG regulations on the national drivers of ESG agenda in these countries, how they respond to sustainability challenges at country and corporate levels and how corporate models, investing and financing policies are changing to implement sustainability principles.

The School of Finance launched this initiative in December 2023 to provide the framework for regular annual international discussions.

The workshop will push forward networking among universities, other institutions and ESG professionals in BRICS and other developing countries. In addition to academic papers, we encourage to submit analytical reports and practical case studies on the topic of the upcoming workshop. We plan to start the series of case studies on emerging capital markets published internationally and in Russia.

We propose to discuss a variety of topics in the following areas, but not limited to:

• Comparative analysis of ESG national regulations and the trends in global agenda;
• The twin transformation. Interaction of digitalization and ESG;
• ESG strategies and corporate performance;
• ESG ratings, their efficiency in measuring business and credit corporate risks for BRICS and other emerging capital markets;
• Islamic approach to sustainability and ESG transformation of a company.  Practices in Middle East and other emerging economies;
• Green & Sustainable Finance in financial institutions.
• Climate finance  and Climate risk management
• ESG implementation in financial institutions (stock exchanges, banks, insurance companies, etc.);
• Impact investing and investor’s behavior in emerging capital markets;
• Sustainable finance and spillover effects over emerging capital markets;
• ESG reporting & impact accounting;
• Integrated reporting and digitalization of non-financial reports;
• Sustainability Reporting Assurance (SRA);
• The quality of non-financial data and reports, their influence on corporate valuations and risk- returns framework;
• Sustainability-related risks, stakeholders and risk management practices;
• Managerial accounting and internal controls implications of ESG transformation;
• Sustainable governance, emerging trends in the board rooms;
• Greenwashing, ESG Data and Business.

Conference dates: 27-28 November 2026.

Working languages: Russian and English. Simultaneous interpretation will be provided at the conference sessions.

The conference will be held in a hybrid format (offline and online). The offline part of the conference will be held at the HSE Moscow campus: Pokrovsky Boulevard, 11.

To attend the conference, please fill out the registration form. 

Applications for participation as a listener will be accepted until 15:00 on November 26, 2026.

An application for participation as a speaker must be accompanied by a detailed abstract of the presentation. General Requirements to the abstract. The abstracts should be sent to the Program Committee - df@hse.ru.

For foreign participants who intend to participate in person, the deadline for submitting abstracts and applications to participate as a speaker is October 16, 2026, inclusive (due to the deadlines for arranging a possible visit).

For all others, the deadline for submitting abstracts and applications to participate as a speaker is November 2, 2026, inclusive.
 

Opportunities for publications:

The best academic papers will be selected for publication in a Special Issue of “Journal of Corporate Finance Research” (JCFR) (English version) indexed in Scopus.

The journal is published by Higher School of Economics in the electronic format (ISSN: 2073-0438) since 2007. The Journal has been indexed by Scopus, RSCI (Russian Science Citation Index), EBSCO, SSRN, Crosref, DOAJ, SCImago Journal Rank etc. Since 2015, it has been included in the 1000 best Russian journals of RSCI (based on Web of Science.)