Financial instability, institutional development and economic crisis in Eastern Europe

The paper investigates the offshore crisis 2015–2017 and its impact on central international offshore oil and gas related maritime cluster, the Blue Maritime Cluster, located at the North-Western coast of Norway.
This complete maritime cluster, heavily involved in offshore petroleum operations, it experienced an almost devastating blow, as it lost almost one-third of its employees as its value added contracted by 39 percent.
When the crises is basically seen as a result of falling of oil prices and lower activity and squeezed profit margins, this paper investigates the crisis in the light of financial instability and reactions down the maritime supply chain.
By collecting data from the Blue Maritime Cluster and the Norwegian central company register one is able both to trace the fall in the activity due to the crisis and measures of financial strength. The study approaches the data by using a structural time series analysis in order to map cycles as deviations from polynomial trends.
The findings ascertain that financial instability was dominant within the Blue Maritime Cluster during its boom before the crisis. Debt ratios and thereby gearing (leverage) were high. Thus, the companies could not meet their obligations when the crisis hit.
The paper also finds that narrow focused supply chain management made the cluster fall deep into the abyss. Companies with a more diversified portfolio were able to meet the hard years better than others.

This study examines the relationship of auditor tenure and audit quality in four European countries, namely Germany, France, Italy and Spain, with the innovative GMM (Generalized Methods of Moments) model during the period from 2005 to 2013.
Two GMM methods are used with two alternative definitions of crisis – the main and the robustness method. The results agree regardless of the fact that some of the control variables are excluded in the robustness test.
The results support the finding that in Spain, there is an impact of auditors’ long-term tenure on discretionary accruals, affecting auditors’ quality and independence indirectly. In addition, the crisis affected Germany and France as far as the change in negative and positive values of GDP is concerned. In this respect, the crisis affected the above two countries when the years before and after the crisis are considered as a robustness check. The results contain important implications for accountant regulators and policy makers.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of banks in Indonesia. Specifically, this study has examined the static effect of ownership structure on bank performance in Indonesia over the period 1995–2006. The sample consists of 74 banks, namely 56 private banks, 15 community development banks (BPD), and three federal banks from 1995 to 2006. The data was analyzed using least-squares regression method, the general least squares method, and the method of random effects. The findings of this study show that the BPD performed better compared to private banks. This indicates that BPDs have better performance rather than private banks which is due to the fact that customers can be able to pay loans, they have special knowledge on that area and the performance of BPD is supervised by local government. In addition, the amount of equity, economic growth, financial crisis, and the financial ratios affect the performance of the bank. However, bank status has no effect on bank performance.