Financial and Operating Risk Analysis of Two Romanian-Hungarian Border Counties

Abstract

The study analyzes the risk of companies selected from two Romanian-Hungarian border counties (Bihor and Hajdú-Bihar counties) by the degree of operational and financial leverage ratios. A total of 1,674 companies from the two counties were included in the analysis, in approximately half and half proportions. In the study, operating, financial and combined leverage ratios are used for risk analysis. Because of the large variance of the ratios, outliers were filtered out. The filtering was based on the degree of the combined leverage ratio, which resulted in 107 companies excluded. In the analysis of sectors, there are significant differences in DOL ratio values between counties. For the DFL indicator, the values are much more balanced. There are also larger differences for DCL, which are likely to be caused by DOL values. The analysis showed no statistically significant difference in leverage ratios between the total county data or the sector-disaggregated county data. The analysis also suggested that some accounting reports may contain manipulations but that further investigations are needed to substantiate them adequately.