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The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of the relationship between business risk and financial leverage. While past theoretical and empirical studies on this topic use similar variables, overall, their findings are inconclusive. In this paper, the author contends this is partially due to inappropriate proxies for business risk that are commonly used in these research papers. To correct for this misspecification, this paper proposes an alternative proxy for business risk that is isolated from the effects of financial leverage.

Past research on the relationship between business risk and financial leverage uses some variations in a firm’s operating cash flow as a proxy for business risk. This proxy cannot solely reflect business risk and may very well be affected by the level of financial leverage, especially for financially distressed firms. This paper proposes an alternative proxy for business risk that is isolated from the effects of financial leverage. This proxy is the cost of capital of an all-equity firm. The theoretical model developed in this paper is based on deriving the optimum level of debt as a function of business risk in the context of the Modigliani and Miller Proposition II model.

The findings show a positive linkage between business risk and financial leverage. This relationship is robust to the various forms the cost of financial distress function may take.

The mixed findings in past research papers regarding the relationship between business risk and financial leverage are mainly due to “inappropriate” measures of business risk that do not only reflect one firm attribute and are contaminated with other factors mainly financial leverage. As such, since the variable of interest is misspecified, the outcome of these studies cannot be credible. This paper attempts to correct for such misspecification by proposing a proxy that only reflects business risk. In addition, the proposed model is based on the widely acceptable Modigliani and Miller static theory of capital structure.

This paper aims to use the Covid-19 pandemic situation to conduct an experiment-like study that focuses on industry reactions under stress. Particularly, this study analyzes stock response to eight pandemic related news in 2020 across different industries. This study also investigates the role that the market risk, beta, plays in such stock reactions.

This study computes the cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) around COVID-19 events using adjusted daily stock returns of all stocks in the S&P 500 index between January 2, 2020 and December 31, 2020. This study also sorts all stocks by beta into quintiles and measures the CAR [0, +3] for each quintile around each event date.

This study finds that low beta portfolios exhibit greater abnormal returns (in absolute value) than high beta portfolios during down markets while high beta portfolios exhibit greater abnormal returns (in absolute values) when the market starts to recover. However, this study finds that beta does not seem to explain the abnormal returns reported in various industries during times of negative sentiment. During times of positive sentiment, both the beta effect and industry effect are present.

Extant literature almost unanimously concurs that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about negative stock reactions to financial markets across the globe. Nevertheless, three interrelated issues have not been explored: market reactions during the subsequent recovery, industry heterogeneity and individual stocks’ risk profile. The study addresses these matters.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which information technology (IT) and human capital accumulation have contributed to the recent rapid economic growth of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Well‐established prior theories suggest that both factors are key growth ingredients. Results from cointegration tests confirm these prior theories and support a strong long‐run (equilibrium) relationship linking real economic growth in the UAE with both IT (alternatively defined) and human capital. However, additional tests based on the Gonzalo and Granger technique reveal that human capital plays a particularly significant role in the growth process.

These results lend support to the notion that good education is a prerequisite before new technologies can produce economic benefits. In contrast with robust long‐run effects, results from error‐correction models indicate that neither IT nor human capital has any significant short‐run effect on real growth.

The paper is of value by demonstrating that efforts to invigorate the education system and the technological infrastructure in the UAE must persist over a long period of time, before they can produce their expected economic benefits.