Purpose: This paper investigates the effect of political connections on the capital structure of banks before and after the financial crisis in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.Design/methodology/approach: This paper employs the natural experiment that the financial crisis offers and uses a difference-in-differences model to investigate the effect of political connections on capital structure. Capital structure is measured by the total debt to total assets ratio. Control variables include bank size, growth, profitability, coverage ratio and volatility. The research sample includes all the banks in the GCC from 2005 to 2016.Findings: The authors find that political connections negatively affect banks capital structure decisions. The results contradict the claim that politically connected firms tend to sustain higher debt due to government privilege and a lower chance of bankruptcy. Additionally, the results show that after the financial crisis, politically connected banks de-lever more compared to non-connected counterparts. This could suggest that the degree of support received by connected banks changes or that they exploit their retained earnings for financing (individual country results, however, suggest that leverage increases in Qatar).Originality/value: This paper provides several contributions. First, GCC countries present an interesting and important area in which to study the relation between political connections and capital structure as it represents a mix of newer markets that seek to attract investors and foreign capital. Second, to the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to examine the effect of the political connection and capital structure in GCC region where royal families play a significant role, especially for banks. Third, our paper is the first to link connections with leverage after the financial crisis in the banking sector. Moreover, our paper is the first to investigate this phenomenon in the GCC countries using manually collected primary data.

This paper examines the literature on the Sustainability in the Arctic region, using a bibliometric analysis of 213 English-language articles published between 1980 and 2022 exploiting Bibliometrix, an R package. To find relevant literature using the Web of Science (WOS) database, we searched for documents using mesh terms based on the query of two terms, “Arctic & Sustainability”. We used the Boolean operator “AND” to combine the two terms and the Boolean operator “OR” to include synonyms of the terms. The articles retrieved were authored by 724 researchers, published in 98 journals, representing 132 countries, and growing at 5.08% annually. The findings reveal that a substantial portion of the Arctic sustainability literature placed significant emphasis on the examination of climate change, adaptation, and vulnerabilities affecting local communities. Furthermore, the more recent publications in this field concentrate predominantly on exploring perceptions and governance.

This study investigates the impact of advanced electricity outage announcements on the operational efficiency of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in Egypt, using profitability as a key performance indicator. Leveraging data from “Transition to Clean Energy Enterprise Survey” and applying the inverse probability-weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA) method to address selection bias, we estimate how outage predictability influences firm outcomes. We find that SMEs receiving advance notice of power disruptions are significantly more likely to achieve higher profitability compared to those without such information. The benefits are most evident among larger firms and sectors such as transportation, financial services, and accommodation, where operational planning is critical. While the policy partially offsets losses from outages, firms in areas with frequent blackouts still face substantial profitability challenges, highlighting the limits of transparency alone. Our findings emphasize that advance announcements enhance SME resilience by enabling adaptive measures, but long-term solutions require complementary infrastructure investments in high-risk regions. The study advocates for policy frameworks centered on transparency and rational expectations, demonstrating how proactive communication in public services can bolster economic resilience amid global uncertainties. These insights are particularly relevant for developing economies seeking to balance immediate crisis management with sustainable energy infrastructure development.