Vinci (France)

ABSTRACT This study investigates whether digital technology adoption can drive both sustainable financial performance and enhanced corporate energy efficiency, which has received limited attention in previous research. Grounded in dynamic capability theory and upper echelons theory, and utilizing a two‐way fixed‐effects regression model, this study analyzes panel data from publicly listed Chinese firms from 2010 to 2022. We assess the “win–win” potential of digital technology adoption on financial and energy outcomes, with a focus on the moderating role of chief digital officers. The results demonstrate that digital technology adoption generates concurrent gains in financial sustainability and energy efficiency, and that the presence of a chief digital officer substantially strengthens these effects. Robustness and endogeneity assessments support these findings. We further identify financing constraints and green technological innovation as mediating channels through which digital technology adoption promotes dual improvements in financial and energy outcomes. Heterogeneity tests indicate stronger effects among larger firms, non‐heavy polluting enterprises, and firms located in central regions of China. These findings highlight the strategic value of digital technology in advancing financial sustainability and corporate energy efficiency, promoting broader corporate commitment to digital transformation.

ABSTRACT With the growing emphasis on sustainability in corporate governance, implementing quotas to increase gender diversity on boards has attracted attention because of its potential to promote more responsible environmental practices, including waste management. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of gender quotas in the boardroom on waste generation for a sample of European listed companies from 2011 to 2021. Based on critical mass and institutional theory perspectives, the results show that gender quotas on boards have a significant negative effect on waste generation. This negative effect increases in countries with binding quotas, suggesting that firms operating in countries with binding gender quotas capitalize on the potential for improved environmental outcomes. Further results show that the negative relationship between gender quotas and waste generation is more prevalent following the Paris Agreement on climate change and the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, in firms with corporate social responsibility (CSR) committees and in firms operating in manufacturing industries.

In this paper, we study the three-dimensional velocity–vorticity–helicity (VVH) formulation modeling the flow of incompressible Newtonian fluids. We present an analysis of the formulation that encompasses the existence and regularity of solutions, providing a rigorous functional framework in which the VVH formulation is shown to be equivalent to the more traditional velocity–pressure formulation.

Van der Waals heterostructures and polymorphs have promised the realization of artificial materials with multiple physical phenomena such as giant optical nonlinearities, spin-to-charge interconversion in spintronics and topological carrier protection, through an infinitely diverse set of 2D quantum materials and their stacking order in a single layered device. However, their exploitation for the terahertz range has been limited with most investigations based around the optical domain, owing to the use of exfoliated material that inherently limits both the dimensions of the materials and the scalability for applications. Here, the combination of terahertz electronic and spin currents is demonstrated through the realization of large area complex crystalline heterostructures of topological insulators, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and ferromagnets. This is demonstrated through down-conversion of optical beams into coherent terahertz currents, where the terahertz phase permits the decoupling of the physical phenomena, and bringing novel functionalities beyond those achievable in simple homostructures. In particular, the role of different TMD polymorphs (stacking orders - 1T', 2H, and 3R) is shown with the simple change of one atomic monolayer of the material stack entirely changing the terahertz responses - both electrical and magnetic - of the artificial material. This allows to highlight ultrafast phenomena that combine both the electronic- and spin-based processes in these structures. The importance of the crystal symmetry on the magnetic properties through proximity effects is further demonstrated, showing a nonlinearity of magnetic origin as a result of the 1T' polymorph. As well as control of the terahertz currents through different polymorphs, this scalable integration of a set of highly diverse materials establishes a platform for next-generation 2D heterostructures that integrate photonic, electronic, and spintronic properties into devicearchitectures.

We present a physics-informed, data-driven framework to predict the service life of reinforced concrete exposed to humidity, chloride corrosion, and freeze-thaw conditions. The approach combines performance-based descriptors (cover, apparent diffusion, chloride boundary and threshold, carbonation coefficient, freeze-thaw intensity) with in-situ sensing proxies (corrosion current, time of wetness) and trains regression and machine learning models to estimate service life. A synthetic but physics-consistent dataset (N=800) spanning urban, marine, and cold climates is released to enable reproducible evaluation. Gradient boosting delivers the best accuracy on a held-out test set, while feature importance confirms the dominance of physically meaningful variables. An ablation study shows that adding sensing features improves accuracy over physics-only inputs. Design curves illustrate actionable trade-offs: benefits of increasing cover saturate beyond about 60-70 mm, and service life decreases monotonically with freeze-thaw intensity. The framework supports optimizing design and material selection to meet target service life while reducing clinker content and embodied CO2. Beyond this contribution, future work will validate the model on multi-site field datasets and integrate it into digital twin platforms for continuous, uncertainty-aware monitoring of reinforced concrete structures.