Ştefan Cristian Gherghina

Bucharest University 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...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the responses of cryptocurrency markets to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) announcement on June 5, 2023, concerning the charges against Binance. This paper investigates the intraday market reactions and volatilities of a set of cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano and Litecoin)...

This study examines the possible dynamic link among economic growth, renewable energy consumption, environmental emissions, and CO2 across various countries from 2000 to 2019. By categorizing countries based on income levels, the research aims to examine the interactions among variables such as CO2 emissions, foreign direct investments (FDI), labor...

Research background: The research employs the Cross-Sectional Absolute Deviation of returns (CSAD) model, augmented with modifications by Chiang and Zheng (2010) to address asymmetric investor behavior, facilitating the detection of herding behavior. Additionally, the study leverages Quantile Regression (QR), demonstrated by Barnes and Hughes (2002...

This study evaluates the synergy of coalition for hybrid renewable energy (RWB) system alternatives. In this context, the alternative sources of hybrid RWB system are examined to illustrate the impact-relation directions among them with multi SWARA based on q-ROFs and golden cut. Next, the performances of renewable alternatives are measured in term...

Artificial Intelligence and Deepfake Technologies have brought a new dimension to the generation of fake data, making it easier and faster than ever before—this fake data could include text, images, sounds, videos, etc. This has brought new challenges that require the faster development of tools and techniques to avoid fraudulent activities at pace...

As global warming progresses, implementing green finance to redirect resources into sustainable initiatives has emerged as a crucial strategy for governments to develop financial systems that are carbon-free, green, and sustainable (Jin et al [...]

In December 2019, a new kind of coronavirus, termed novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV or COVID-19), was noticed in Wuhan, China, and has now rapidly spread throughout China and the world [2].

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), distinguishing between genuine and AI-generated content, particularly in finance, has become challenging. Previous studies have focused on binary identification of ChatGPT-generated content, overlooking other AI tools used for text regeneration. This study addresses this gap by examining various AI-reg...

This study is an in-depth exploration of the nascent field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), and it concentrates on the vital task of distinguishing between human-generated text and content that has been produced by AI models. Particularly, this research pioneers the identification of financial text d...

Investigating the spillover connectedness between cryptocurrency and energy sector from the perspective of the investigation under asymmetric exogenous shocks of health and geopolitical crisis and uncertainties still represents in the contemporary global and highly competitive economy a very actual research topic, despite the numerous corpus of lit...

The United Kingdom and the EU-27 nations’ sustainable development is evaluated in the present chapter using the data envelopment analysis method.

The EU-27 nations and the United Kingdom are classified in the present chapter based on their ability to achieve sustainable economic growth using a cluster analysis.

The current chapter adopts the vector error correction model (VECM) technique, complemented by impulse response functions and variance decomposition, to investigate the causal relationships between sustainable development goals and gross domestic product per capita.

The current chapter discusses the variables employed, the data sources, as well as the quantitative framework. Therewith, statistical facts regarding sustainable development goals, alongside the outcomes of the quantitative modeling are presented throughout this chapter.

The complex set of factors involved in sustainable development will be explored during the course of this chapter.

Developing an aggregate indicator to assess the sustainable development of the EU-27 countries and the United Kingdom is the main objective of this chapter. Furthermore, the association between the developed indicator and the gross domestic product per capita is discussed in the course of this chapter.

The purpose of this study is to identify important strategies to increase sustainable energy investments in emerging economies. For this situation, first, four different indicators are selected according to the dimensions of the balanced scorecard technique. The weights of these items are computed by using Quantum Spherical fuzzy DEMATEL. In the se...

The advanced urban digitization enhancing a huge volume of data collected in many areas has led to the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) based tools in decision support systems. These use various machine learning algorithms to extract valuable information for important decision-making such as house price predictions. The urban real estate i...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between investor sentiment and leading equity market indices from the U.S., Europe, Asia, and globally between January 2020 and June 2022. The methodological approaches utilized are quantile regression and wavelet analysis. The results of quantile regression suggested that Google Search V...

Corporate finance is a branch of finance that focuses on how companies handle their cash flow, raise capital, make investments, and implement accounting systems [...]

The war in Ukraine affects the European Union (EU) member states asymmetrically. The purpose of the study is to determine changes in the development of the EU countries in three key directions: ‘economy and environment’, ‘business and trade’, and ‘people and work’; to identify clusters of countries with similar transformations; and to model the imp...

The emergence of the novel coronavirus in December 2019 manifested in an expanding prevalence of confirmed cases worldwide, posing a significant challenge to international healthcare safety; with this incident, the notion of “regular life” shifted (Guven et al [...]

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...

This paper aims to investigate the determinants of capital structure in developing countries, like Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. This research adopts the unbalanced panel data of 152 listed companies, over the period 1996-2020, estimated by two-stage least squares.

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...

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...

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 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...