Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of debt financing on both performance and systematic risk in Amman Stock Exchange listed firms. The authors focus the study to analyze the differences between services and industrial firms in one sense and the differences between international and domestic firms in the other sense, as the study depends on the geographical distribution of sales to classify the nationality of firms. Design/methodology/approach: The study sample includes all listed Jordanian firms in Amman Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2013 for both industrial and services sectors. Using panel data techniques, fixed effects regression with modified Driscoll-Kraay standard error as a remedy for heteroscedasticity problem is employed. Findings: The results show that there is a significant negative impact of debt financing on the firm’s performance, where the sector and the sales nationality play an important role. Moreover, the results indicate that there is a significant positive impact of debt financing on the firm’s systematic risk. Taking the sector and sales nationality into consideration, the authors find that the debt financing has no significant impact on the systematic risk of services firms and domestic firms. Additionally, the findings indicate that services firms and international firms are, on average, more riskier than industrial firms and domestic firms, respectively. Originality/value: The paper provides a visibility on the comparison between international and local firms in Jordan in terms of the impact of debt financing on the financial performance and systematic risk in one research.

Purpose: This paper aims to compare Islamic and commercial banks in the region of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in terms of profitability and stability. Design/methodology/approach: The study combines both the descriptive and analytical approaches. It considers panel data sets and adopts panel data econometric techniques. Findings: The determinants of banks profitability and stability are different according to bank’s type. The results show that Islamic banks are more profitable than commercial banks, while on the other hand, commercial banks are more stable than Islamic banks. It is also concluded that banks profitability and stability are determined through some bank’s characteristics variables and macroeconomic variables in addition to the financial crises. MENA commercial and Islamic banking was affected by the financial crises in terms of profitability and stability. Additionally, larger banks are more stable than smaller banks, and off-balance sheet activities increase banks’ vulnerability for both commercial and Islamic MENA banks. Research limitations/implications: The most prominent limitation is the lack of data, as we had to exclude some variables because of missing observations. As a result, the authors could not use data envelopment approach and stochastic frontier approach to evaluate banks efficiency in MENA countries rather than the financial ratios. Practical implications: Commercial banks need to enhance their capitalization to improve their profitability. Additionally, Islamic banks need to improve the risk assessment and adopt some of the available risk management tools. Moreover, the banking system should take advantage of relatively higher Islamic banks profitability and use the unexploited profit opportunities through spreading into those countries with limited availability, such as the North African countries. Originality/value: This study address both banks profitability and stability in an emerging region that includes banks of different types (Islamic and commercial) which are located in different counties that allows accounting for operational and institutional differences.

The propositional satisfiability (SAT) problem is one of the most fundamental problems in computer science. SAT solvers have been successfully applied to a wide range of practical applications, including hardware model checking, software model finding, equivalence checking, and planning, among many others. Empirical research has been very fruitful for the development of efficient methods for SAT problems, such as classical Davis-Putnam method, greedy SAT (GSAT) method and neural network SAT method. This paper gives a survey about the methods used for solving the SAT problems with an emphasis on surveying the local search algorithms.