Performance evaluation using the CAMELS model: A comparative study of local commercial banks in Qatar and Kuwait

The improvement of global Internet access and the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated mass testing of online teaching methods, have forwarded the competition between higher education institutions from the regional level and the struggle for the rich student into the competition for students in all countries. The paper aims to determine the influence of the rating of higher education institutions on the interest of Internet users by conducting a comparative analysis of the popularity of the official names of higher education institutions in search queries in Ukraine and Poland. To do this, a comparative analysis of the change in the interest in leading higher education institutions in Ukraine and Poland in search queries in the Google search engine is carried out. The analysis is performed using the Google Trends web application. As a result, it is found that a high position of the university in the national ranking does not guarantee more search queries about it on the Internet by both national Internet users and users from the neighboring country. In general, Internet users continue to be most interested in universities located in their region at the time of the search.

The impact of financial risks on share prices concerns investors, company executives and accounting standards developers. Investors need this information in delineating their equity valuation models while company executives need the information to make appropriate capital structure decisions. Accounting standards developers use this information in their policy to make accounting standards contemporary.
The authors examine the link between relative and absolute financial risks and share prices using a dynamic panel of non-financial listed companies on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange after dollarization. Equity investors incurred losses before dollarization, which prompted this investigation into the sphere of financial risks in order to explain share price movements so that investors can use it to minimize losses in the future. Absolute financial risk is measured by the total debt, while debt/equity ratio measures relative financial risk. Market capitalization as a proxy for equity and debt is measured by total liabilities. An average debt/equity ratio greater or equal to one qualifies a firm into the high-risk category while ratios below one imply low-risk firms. Results from two-step System Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) show negative and significant connection between relative risk and share prices across risk categories. The impact of absolute risk on share prices differs by risk category. Firm managers are advised to keep total liabilities below market capitalization in order to enjoy the benefits of low-risk categorization. Debt ratio is a reasonable indicator of value and investors can use it in equity valuation. Mandatory reporting of debt ratios should be considered by accounting standards developers.

The study investigates the entrepreneurial competencies and intentions of students. Their formation is a requirement of modern times. The question arises whether students of modern technical universities get entrepreneurial competencies and whether they transform these competencies into their entrepreneurial intentions. More than 3.6 thousand students from six technical universities from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Lithuania were surveyed. Methods of summarizing and grouping data, analysis of the structure of the population and distributions of its elements, evaluation of relationships were used to analyze the results of the survey. It was found that studying at technical universities is not an obstacle to the existence of entrepreneurial intentions among students. The respondents positively assessed their ability to recognize market opportunities for new business (the sum of the shares of positive answers exceeded the sum of the shares of negative answers by 12.4%). A positive generalized assessment was determined when assessing the ability to persuade others to invest in their business, while negative – their ability to write a formal business plan. It is proved that students who highly value their entrepreneurial abilities are much more likely to show the intention to start their own business (р < 0.001). Students’ focus on starting their own business is partly explained by the fact that they connect employment in corporations with a low guarantee of job retention. High positive integrated assessments received the following advantages of own entrepreneurship: prestige (0.302), chance to be realized (0.362), and the ability to create jobs (0.597).

Acknowledgment
The authors wish to thank Denislava Yordanova (Sofia University, Bulgaria), Tatjana Nikitina (Riga Technical University, Latvia), and Daiva Jurevičienė (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania) for helping to collect data at respective countries.