The EU sustainable finance taxonomy regulation

In this article, we look at the Taxonomy Regulation, which entered into force in June 2020. We describe the requirements for investments and listed companies to have their economic activities labelled green, conditional on not violating safe-guards against doing significant harm to social or human rights. We find that the Taxonomy Regulation is a hybrid regulation, which aims at influencing business activities through regulation of financial services. The relevance of this article for finance research is not least to make clear the bias, or research premise, that will be introduced into any quantitative research on green premiums (the so-called greemiums) of EU financial services and listed shares and bonds after 1 January 2022, when the technical screening criteria of the Taxonomy Regulation enter into force and complete the definition of what con-stitutes sustainable or green economic activity. To a large extent, this will serve to make cross-European comparisons of greemiums (green premiums) easier as data on what is green will be based on European standards. Others might argue that legislating a definition of what is considered green or sustainable should be left to the market, for better or worse.