Adopting US-GAAP Or IASB Accounting Standards By The Arab Countries

This paper examines whether Arab countries have adopted the standards issued by the International Accounting Standards Board (lASB) or the US-GAAP.  The results of this study show that companies in the Arab world use different accounting rules and regulations for measurement, recognition, and disclosures of financial position and results of operation.  Consequently, comparability of the financial results of different companies in different countries in the Arab world is impaired.  We recommend adopting financial accounting standards issued by the IASB.  Our study shows that adopting IASB standards has a positive impact on the economic development of the Arab countries

Empirical Testing Of Different Alternative Proxy Measures For Firm Size

This paper examines the relationship among total sales revenue, total assets, book value of equity, and market value of equity for different economic sectors and timeperiods.  Five statistical tools are used to examine the relationship among the different proxies of size of the firm for the period 1999-2002. Our study shows that the relationships among the four measures of the size of the firm are not the same for the different economic sectors and are not stable over time for each economic sector.  Our results suggest that the use of the four measures interchangeably as a proxy for the firm size may not be appropriate

Using accounting ratios to distinguish between Islamic and conventional banks in the GCC region

This study determines whether it is possible to distinguish between conventional and Islamic banks in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region on the basis of financial characteristics alone. Islamic banks operate under different principles, such as risk sharing and the prohibition of interest, yet both types of banks face similar competitive conditions. The combination of effects makes it unclear whether financial ratios will differ significantly between the two categories of banks. We input 26 financial ratios into logit, neural network, and k-means nearest neighbor classification models to determine whether researchers or regulators could use these ratios to distinguish between the two types of banks. Although the means of several ratios are similar between the two categories of banks, non-linear classification techniques (k-means nearest neighbors and neural networks) are able to correctly distinguish Islamic from conventional banks in out-of-sample tests at about a 92% success rate.

Efficiency and bank profitability in MENA countries

This study compares accounting-based and economic-based measures of efficiency and profitability of banks in ten Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. Accounting variables help explain cost and profit efficiency, but cost efficiency has little impact on profitability and profit efficiency. Our results suggest that researchers perhaps should focus more on profit efficiency than cost efficiency. MENA banks are slightly less cost efficient than European banks, but similar to banks in developing economies. However, MENA banks score well in terms of profit efficiency relative to banks world-wide. Finally, almost all banks in the MENA region are below optimal size.MENA banks Bank efficiency Bank performance