We examine the impact of corporate governance on risk and forward-looking disclosures in Qatar. Design: We automatically measure levels of risk and forward-looking disclosures in the annual reports of Qatari firms for the period 2008-2014. We also use two ways clustered error pooled panel regressions to examine the determinants of these disclosures. Findings: We find that firms with a higher percentage of foreign ownership disclose more forward-looking information; conversely, board size has a negative impact on the forward-looking disclosure. Financial firms tend to disclose less forward-looking information, however, they tend to disclose more forward-looking information after the 2008 global financial crisis. We also find negative relationships between the risk disclosure and both the number of non-executive members of the board of directors and duality role of the CEO. Research implications: Our findings should help the users of corporate annual reports in Qatar to understand managerial incentives for reporting risk and forward-looking information. This should help regulators to set a proper set of disclosure rules. Moreover, this study increases our understanding of the behavior of international investors and the board characteristics (i.e. board size) in motivating risk and forward-looking disclosures in Qatari firms. Originality: We provide the original empirical evidence on the impact of corporate ownership and board characteristics on risk and forward-looking disclosures for Qatari firms using two ways clustered error pooled panel regressions.

With computers, security is only a matter of software. The Internet has made computer security much more difficult than it used to be. In this paper, we introduce modified AES with S-boxes bank to be acted like rotor mechanism and dynamic key MDS matrix (SDK-AES). In this paper we try to make AES key dependent and resist the frequency attack. The SDK-AES algorithm is compared with AES and gives excellent results from the viewpoint of the security characteristics and the statistics of the ciphertext. Also, we apply the randomness tests to the SDK-AES algorithm and the results shown that the new design passes all tests which proven its security

PurposeThis 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/approachThis 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.FindingsThe 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/valueThis 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.

Purpose This paper aims to present a catalogue of the influential aspects resulting from a bibliometric meta-analysis of political connection literature. Design/methodology/approach This study undertakes a bibliometric meta-analysis review of political connections literature, covering 138 research papers from 2000 to 2020 using the visualization of similarities viewer program. Findings The authors identify six research groups: the value of political connections; political connections and finance; political connections in banks; political connections and debt; management and political connections; and political connections and governance. This study discusses each stream through a cartographic analysis, including co-authorship, countries and time networks. Originality/value This study makes an important and novel contribution to political connection literature. So far, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the only bibliometric study on political connections. This study is the first to use network analysis and community detection to understand social clustering and to identify main research steams in political connection literature.

Abstract-Authenticated key agreement protocols have an important role in building secure communications between two or more parties over the open network. In this paper we propose an efficient and secure authenticated key agreement protocol based on RSA factoring and Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP). We try to design strong protocol depends on the relation between two assumption (RSA factoring and DLP). We show that our protocol meets the security attributes and strong against most of potential attacks.