Ştefan Cristian Gherghina

Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies | ASE · Department of Finance

This paper examines the impact of corporate governance mechanisms and CEO characteristics on U.S. listed companies’ performance. The corporate governance mechanisms are: shareholdings of insiders, shareholdings of the institutional investors and mutual funds, board size and the number of independent directors in the board. We used as performance me...

This study examines the relationship between corporate governance ratings and firm performance, including both a global measure of corporate governance and four sub-indices corresponding Audit, Board Structure, Shareholder Rights and Compensation, provided by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS). The corporate governance ratings represent a pro...

The banking sector has a significant impact on a nation’s financial stability and economic development. As one of the fundamental components of the financial sector, banks offer services that are essential for the expansion of the markets. The stability of the financial system is significantly impacted by the efficiency of the banking sector. COVID...

This paper explores the asymmetric effect of COVID-19 pandemic news, as measured by the coronavirus indices (Panic, Hype, Fake News, Sentiment, Infodemic, and Media Coverage), on the cryptocurrency market. Using daily data from January 2020 to September 2021 and the exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model, the re...

The world’s cities, particularly African cities, are experiencing rapid exponential population growth. They need to respond dynamically to major challenges, such as digitalisation, the connected and smart city, sustainability, resilience, inclusion and economic development. To do so, modern and innovative urban planning actors must enable urban for...

This study examined the asymmetric effects of major uncertainty and volatility indices (economic policy uncertainty, Chicago Board Options Exchange crude oil volatility, CBOE volatility index, CBOE VIX volatility, and NASDAQ 100 volatility target) on the returns of global energy and its constituents (global energy index, Brent, heating oil, natural...

The study examines the nexus between global energy commodity and its constituent across market conditions using the quantile regression approaches. We found that the positive effect of global energy commodity on its constituents was stronger relative to the feedback effect from the constituents. It is pertinent to hedge against fluctuations in the...

The European Union is facing the highest natural gas prices in 15 years, owing largely to an upward trend in electricity prices, which is also on an uphill curve. However, the rise in electricity and natural gas prices is a widespread phenomenon that is being felt not only in Europe but also globally, as economic activity resumes and energy consump...

Research background: The contagious impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened financial market's volatility, nonlinearity, asymmetric and nonstationary dynamics. Hence, the existing relationship among financial assets may have been altered. Moreover, the level of investor risk aversion and market opportunities could also alter in the pandemic....

Research background: The contagious impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened financial market's volatility, nonlinearity, asymmetric and nonstationary dynamics. Hence, the existing relationship among financial assets may have been altered. Moreover, the level of investor risk aversion and market opportunities could also alter in the pandemic....

The diversity of data collected on both social networks and digital interfaces is extremely increased, raising the problem of heterogeneous variables that are not often favourable to classification algorithms. Despite the significant improvement in machine learning (ML) and predictive analysis efficiency for classification in customer relationship...

The development of an enterprise under current conditions requires an integrated approach and an appropriate financing system. The purpose of this study is to justify the replication model of financing the integrated enterprise development. The research methodology suggests that each enterprise has its own development “genome”, which makes it possi...

The use of machine learning (ML) methods has been widely discussed for over a decade. The search for the optimal model is still a challenge that researchers seek to address. Despite advances in current work that surpass the limitations of previous ones, research still faces new challenges in every field. For the automatic targeting of customers in...

Today, the growing Asia-Pacific population causes a dramatic growth in energy supply to meet energy demand. The rapid rise in energy demand is causing concern in the region. Thus, the present study scrutinizes the effect of energy policy involvement in steering-up renewable energy development by empirically assessing the role of policy instruments...

The COVID-19 pandemic remained a global risk factor and integrated into various means in the functioning of companies, economies and financial markets. Therefore, this paper investigates how COVID-19 influences the energy market in the main financial markets (China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States), using time series from Februa...

Price discovery function analyses the dynamics of futures and spot price behavior in an asset’s intertemporal dimensions. The present study examines the price discovery function of the bullion, metal, and energy commodity futures and spot prices through the Granger causality and Johansen–Juselius cointegration tests. The Granger causality test resu...

On 3 April 2016, Mossack Fonseca provided the historically most significant leak of its shareholder’s data for owning offshore companies. Shareholders include many political and influential figures around the globe, which causes a moral hazard. The study analyses the effects of Panama leak events on five stock exchanges to ensure the market efficie...

The global outbreak of COVID‐19 disease had a significant impact on the entire globe. Such a notable public health event can be seen as a “black swan” that brings unpredictable and unusual forces into the economic context and that it could typically lead to a chain of adverse reactions and market disruptions. Hence, the purpose of this study is to...

The objective of this study is to explore the impact of electronic commerce on employment rate for a sample covering the whole 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27), from 2010 to 2019. Moreover, this research explores the clusters of nations with reference to electronic commerce adoption and employment rate dynamics. The outcomes of cluste...

This paper investigates the volatility of daily returns on the Romanian stock market between January 2020 and April 2021. Volatility is analyzed by means of the representative index for Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE), namely, the Bucharest Exchange Trading (BET) index, along with twelve companies traded on BSE. The quantitative investigation was pe...

The essence of this study is to investigate the influence of the board gender diversity on firms’ accounting and market-based performance using a sample of Standard & Poor’s 500 companies belonging to the information technology sector over 12 years. Using the pooled ordinary least squares (OLS) method, the outcomes provide evidence for a positive i...

This paper explores the microeconomic and macroeconomic drivers of financial structure, through a sample of 30 technology companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, over the period 2005-2018. The financial structure was assessed via long-term debt rate, short-term debt rate and total debt rate, whereas the size of the company, tangibility of...

This study highlights the effects of the fiscal and economic factors as well as of the worldwide governance indicators on the economic growth rate in the OECD countries for a period of time between 2002 and 2017. The empirical analysis implies the use ofaPanel data whichis econometrically estimated by applying the "least squares method" and the "ge...

This paper aims to explore the stock market returns-COVID-19 interdependence via wavelet coherence analysis. The sample comprises the top 15 affected countries by novel coronavirus outbreak, covering each continent over the period 1 January 2020 to 23 July 2020. Using daily stock index returns, COVID-19 new cases and new deaths, the empirical findi...

The objective of the present paper is to determine the existence of a link between energy, CO2 emissions, economic growth, and urbanization worldwide level. Therefore, to achieve our goal, we approached a series of statistical techniques that allow us to study the cointegration between variables, impulse response function to follows the effect of a...

Corporate finance deals with the financing and investment decisions set by the corporations’ management in order to maximize the value of the shareholders’ wealth [...]

This paper examines the linkages in financial markets during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak. For this purpose, daily stock market returns were used over the period. The study applied the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to explore whether the Romanian stock market is impacted by the crisis generated by novel corona...

This paper aimed to investigate the impact of water, waste, and energy consumption on firm performance for a sample of enterprises that belong to the S&P 500 Information Technology sector over the period of 2009–2020. The quantitative framework covered both accounting (e.g., return on assets—ROA; return on common equity—ROE; return on capital—ROC;...

The present paper evaluates the Romanian public universities from funding efficiency point of view over the past 7 years, respectively 2012-2018. In order to evaluate the funding efficiency, we employed a nonparametric method, namely data envelopment analysis (DEA) for three-cycle system (technical efficiency from constant return to scale, technica...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are crucial for local economic development, playing a noteworthy role in job creation, poverty alleviation and economic growth, but they encounter many funding barriers. The purpose of the current paper is to investigate the impact of investments and innovation on territorial economic growth, as measured by...

This paper aims to analyze the influencing factors on the financial structure of 51 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, in the technology industry, from 2005–2018. The objective is to see the impact of independent company-specific variables such as company size, tangibility of assets, growth opportunity, effective tax rate, current liq...

This paper aims at exploring the drivers of dwellings'sale prices in Bucharest, Romania, over the period 2014-2018. Several housing structural attributes are covered, such as the number of rooms, useful and constructed surface, type of comfort, floor, the number of bathrooms, balconies and parking, the seniority from construction, as well as from r...

This study aims to examine the link between foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and economic growth, also considering several institutional quality variables, as well as sustainable development goals (SDGs) set in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By estimating panel data regression models for a sample of 11 Central and Eastern Europ...

Energy is considered a critical driver of social and economic progress, but the use of conventional energy from fossil fuel sources is viewed as the main contributor to greenhouse gases that cause global warming. To overcome such issues, renewable energy technologies appeared as a viable substitute which lessens pollutant emissions and protect the...

This paper aims to examine stock market integration at international level among developed economies from Americas (US), and Pacific (Japan), alongside emerging markets out of Europe (Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary) and frontier European stock markets (Romania). In the context of Big Data, by employing daily data over the period of 2010-2019, the...

his paper aims to establish whether the Romanian energy market has an influence on the good running of the associated capital market. In order to achieve this objective, we approached a series of econometric techniques that allowed us to study the cointegration between variables, the presence of short-term or long-term causality relationships, and...

This paper explores the sensitivity of Romanian collective investment undertakings’ returns to changes in equity, fixed income and foreign exchange market returns. We use a sample of 80 open-end investment funds and pension funds with daily returns between 2016 and 2018. Our methodology consists of measuring changes in the daily conditional volatil...

This paper aims at exploring the drivers of dwellings’sale prices in Bucharest, Romania, over the period 2014-2018. Several housing structural attributes are covered, such as the number of rooms, useful and constructed surface, type of comfort, floor, the number of bathrooms, balconies and parking, the seniority from construction, as well as from r...

This paper examines the nexus between the main forms of transport, related investments, specific air pollutants, and sustainable economic growth. The research is important since transport may act as a facilitator of social, economic, and environmental development. Based on data retrieved from Eurostat, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Dev...

This study examines the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis (EKC), considering the primary energy consumption among other country-specific variables, for a panel of the EU-28 countries during the period 1990–2014. By estimating pooled OLS regressions with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors in order to account for cross-sectional dependence, the resu...

This paper analyzes the evolution of the main theories regarding the capital structure and the related impact on risk and corporate performance. The capital structure is a dynamic process that changes over time, depending on the variables that influence the overall evolution of the economy, a particular sector, or a company. It may also change depe...

This paper explores the drivers of effective corporate tax rate (ECTR) for a panel of companies listed on eight stock exchanges from EU Members that had an accession in 2004-2007 (Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia). The covered period of data panel was between 2000 and 2016. Following the viewpoint of firm...

This study aims at empirically investigating the drivers of sustainable economic growth in EU-28 countries. By means of panel data regression models, in the form of fixed and random effects models, alongside system generalized method of moments, we examine several drivers of real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, as follows: higher educatio...

This article examines the driving factors of the effective corporate tax rate (ECTR) for a sample of companies listed on five Eastern European stock exchanges (Romania, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and Slovenia), covering the period 2000–2016. The empirical research covers variables regarding firm characteristics (e.g., profitability, efficiency of a...

By considering the fact that education in an important component within the context of Europe 2020 strategy, this paper aims at developing an aggregated indicator towards the assessment of European education systems, thereby being employed multidimensional data analysis techniques, namely principal component analysis.Withal, by using unsupervised c...

Gender diversity is a powerful source of competitive advantage for corporations, bringing a wider spectrum of perspectives and professional expertise. Likewise, women are stereotypically good communicators, being capable of empathy, thus providing support in the quest to develop a corporate social responsibility (CSR) vision that is at the core of...

Energy is crucial to economic progress, but the contemporary worldwide population increase that demands greater energy generated from conventional exhaustible resources, an energy price upsurge, and environmental concerns, imperils sustainable economic growth. Nevertheless, switching to renewable energy produced from naturally replenished resources...

The aim of the paper is to examine the determinants of effective corporate tax rate for three listed companies from Eastern European Stock Exchanges - Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, for the period 2006-2015. Using multivariate regressions and different estimation methods (data panels with OLS EGLS and quantile regressions) we studied the link betw...

This study aims to examine the impact of following ISO management system standards on economic sentiment indicator (ESI) as proxy of economic agents' general view concerning economic activity, for 21 European Union member states over 2005-2014. The empirical research comprises ISO standards with reference to management systems towards quality (ISO...

The recent financial crisis highlighted the need for a strong emphasis on the effectiveness of board risk oversight practices. Good corporate governance upholds effective risk management, which in turn ensures the flexibility to reply to unpredicted threats and take benefit of opportunities. Thus, risk management affords corporate resilience that e...

We blend the corporate governance and corporate taxation literature streams to study the association between board, abreast CEO characteristics, and effective corporate tax rate. We have tried to sweep a broad brush over a large number of different econometric techniques that are relevant to the analysis of financial data. Using a sample of 50 comp...

This paper empirically investigates the linkage of corporate taxation with the corporate governance and audit for a panel data sample of 50 companies, listed at NASDAQ and component of Dow Jones index, between 2000 and 2013. By estimating fixed effects panel least squares models, we find empirical evidence which shows that board independence, CEO t...

Using a dataset comprising 50 corporations listed at NASDAQ and component of Dow Jones index, over an extended period spanning 2000-2013, this article explores the link between corporate governance and taxation. The analysis is primarily carried out by estimating panel least squares and quantile regressions, combined with robustness checks such as...

This paper examines the influence of board and CEO characteristics on effective corporate tax rate in a sample of 50 companies, mainly from the technology area, listed at NASDAQ and component of Dow Jones index, over the period 2000-2013. Econometric estimations provide support that board independence and board size have a negative impact on corpor...

This paper aims at exploring the influence of compliance with the principles and recommendations stated within the Bucharest Stock Exchange (BSE) Corporate Governance Code on firm value, for a sample of companies listed in Romania, in 2011. Firm value was proxied both through accounting measures (such as return on assets, ROA and return on equity,...

Current research aims at developing a comprehensive financial instrument towards valuation business failure risk for a sample of 69 companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange in 2013. There were considered several financial ratios such as liquidity ratios (e.g., current ratio, quick ratio, cash ratio), indebtedness ratios (e.g., general indeb...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) highlights the reaction to social pressures, respectively the reply to the needs and expectations of stakeholders, concerns towards the environment, and social needs that depict its dimensions. Our paper aims at providing evidence on the links between CSR and firm value on the example of listed companies in Rom...

This paper examines the drivers of effective corporate tax rate (ECTR) for a sample of S&P 500 companies, 2000-2014. The research covers variables towards firm characteristics, audit fees, and corporate governance. Based on generalised least square estimations, we provide evidence for a positive impact of capital intensity, debt to equity ratio, eq...

This article investigates the influence of characteristics of the corporate board and chief executive officer (CEO) on firm value, using a sample of companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange from 2007 to 2011. We consider board independence, committees, size, and diversity as board characteristics, as well as CEO characteristics such as CEO...

The purpose of the present paper is that of researching the relationship between corporate governance and financial performance, on a sample of 51 companies, mainly from the technology area, listed at NASDAQ and component of the Dow Jones index, during the period 2000-2013. The financial performance has been proxied through return on assets (ROA),...

This paper aims at empirically investigating the impact of higher education and technology on economic growth within the following Central and Eastern European countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. By employing the least squares method the results provide support for a positive influence of adult literacy rate and a mix...

This paper aims at empirically investigating the relationship between the internal corporate governance mechanisms (board size, independence, gender diversity, CEO duality), CEO characteristics (gender, age, tenure, state of residence), and industry-adjusted accounting-based measures (return on assets and return on equity) alongside market-based me...

Corporate bankruptcy analysis is very important for investors, creditors, borrowing companies, as well as governments. The assessment of business failure provides tremendous information for governments, investors, shareholders, and the management based on which financial decisions are taken towards preventing potential losses. Likewise, by research...

The aim of this study is to research the influence of ownership structure on firm value in order to provide, from our knowledge, the first results for the case of the Bucharest Stock Exchange listed companies. Therefore, we have considered the shareholdings of the following types of shareholders: insiders, companies from financial intermediation se...

This paper examines the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings and firm value, by using a sample of U.S. companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ Stock Market, over 2008-2011. The Corporate Social Responsibility Index (CSRI) developed by Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship and Reputation Ins...