The purpose of the current article is to determine the sustainability of international accreditations for business schools. As international accreditations are viewed as a costly process, universities must think if this endeavor could have a positive impact in the long run. From an impact point of view, we look at the intake of students, focusing on the factors that impact the decision of students in their choice of university. We have noticed that these international accreditations are pursued by business schools to increase their outreach and to receive a certification of quality that is recognized overseas. We consider the hypothesis that international accreditation is a key factor in the decision-making process of candidates, and we tested it by applying a questionnaire to 400 business and economics students that are studying in two business schools. From the 400 students that answered the questionnaire, only 199 responses were considered fully answered and proper for our study. Our results show that there is a difference between French and Romanian students in the choice of universities. While both groups agree that internationalization is important, their decisions are based on different elements. Our research is among the few that look both at the student choice and at the impact of the international accreditation on the student numbers.

While the moral argument for gender diversity has already been made and is incontestable, and more and more economical arguments have been brought to support the business case for the presence of women on the boards of directors of publicly listed companies, the bottom-line issue of what kind of impact gender diverse boards have on firm financial performance is still unclear. The aim of this paper is to deliver a comparative analysis of the impact of gender diverse boards on firm financial performance in France and Romania. Our results do not to provide any evidence of a link between boards’ gender diversity and companies’ financial performance, but while the analysis has failed to find a positive link between female presence and firm financial performance, it has not outlined a negative one.

The evolution of stock market indices is one of the most intensely studied subjects, given that in this particular field, successful insights can offer both academic and financial benefits. Understandably, most focus lies on developed markets that drive economies, with less interest in frontier or emerging markets such as the Romanian stock market. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the connections between the Romanian stock market index BET and major indices from the USA (NASDAQ, S&P500, DIJA), Western Europe (FTSE100, CAC40, DAX), and Central and Eastern Europe (ATX, BUX, WIG20). The analysis explores the use of genetic programming tools to model BET index values using short-term intervals and compares them with standard machine learning models. Our findings indicate that short-term analysis presents significant challenges to all models due to inherent complexity and variability in the data.

The medical sector is of the utmost importance in every country for well-known reasons such as their economic development, national security, quality of life, and so on. Many researchers were dedicated to this topic, however, in Romania there are limited studies on this subject. One reason is that most of the businesses in this sector are individual enterprises or small family businesses. In our research paper we deploy several analysis methods to see the financial sustainability of companies operating in the medical industry. By analyzing a sample of 23931 companies and we have concluded that their performance has increase in the peak of the pandemic and that the financial stability is high. Our results are in line with other similar studies that were conducted in other regions.

The evolution of stock market indices is one of the most intensely studied subjects, given that in this particular field successful insights can offer both academic and financial benefits. Understandably, most focus lies on developed markets that drive economies, with less interest in frontier or emerging markets such as the Romanian stock market. In this paper, we offer an analysis of the connections between the Romanian stock market index BET and major indices from the USA (NASDAQ, S&P500, DIJA), Western Europe (FTSE100, CAC40, DAX) and Central and Eastern Europe (ATX,BUX, WIG20). The analysis explores the use of genetic programming models for the prediction of index values using short-term intervals and compares them with standard regression models. We find that most methods perform in an almost similar manner and that the best numerical results are obtained when considering the Central and Eastern European indices.