Business education and entrepreneurial skills: Evidence from Arab universities

The authors aimed to investigate business undergraduates’ cognition toward entrepreneurship; in particular, they examined four entrepreneurship skills. Data consist of questionnaire responses obtained from 668 undergraduates attending universities in two different Arab countries. The study used a logistic regression to gauge the effect of delivering four entrepreneurial skills on entrepreneurship cognition. The results reveal that business students perceive the four entrepreneurial skills as key elements for starting their own business.     

Breaker of Barriers? Notes on the Geopolitics of the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham

In the last two years, the so-called “Islamic State in Iraq and Sham” has transformed the Syrian Civil War, effecting serious confrontations in Iraq and Lebanon, dismantling security regimes along the Iraq-Syria border, and causing the mass exodus of ethno-religious communities across the region. These dramatic events are often interpreted through the official rhetoric of the group itself, which draws on discourses of the “Sykes-Picot” conspiracy and narratives of returning to Islamic principles. Tempting though it is to deconstruct such rhetoric on its own, efforts in this direction have over-emphasised its Islamic and territorial elements to the detriment of a deeper understanding of the locally varying, strategic nature of ISIS’s activities in the Middle East. Accordingly, this paper considers how local interests articulate with ISIS’s transnational movement, looking at their activities along the border region of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. It begins with a discourse analysis of one important narrative in early analysis of ISIS’s “border-breaking” rhetoric, the narrative of Sykes-Picot, before laying out how geographers have engaged with the geopolitics of radical Islamist militant groups more generally. Then drawing on a combination of secondary sources and ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and Jordan, it elaborates how the politics of place shapes ISIS’s political practice, using the example of the Syrian-Iraqi borderland (the Jazirah). In doing so, I hope to emphasise the relative importance of historical-geographic context over discourse and narrative for understanding the actions of ISIS.     

An Analysis of Post-Deregulation Savings-and-Loan Failures

A number of studies have looked at the financial characteristics of problem or failed savings and loans but none have used data taken exclusively from the post-deregulation period. In this paper, the financial characteristics of savings and loan associations that failed during the period 1984-II to 1985-I are analyzed, using both univariate difference in means tests and multivariate logistic regression. Both the known unequal population prior probabilities and the estimated unequal misclassification costs are taken into account in the logistic regression. The empirical results are compared to those of recent studies by Benston [7] and Barth, Brumbaugh, Sauerhaft and Wang [5] . The financial ratios that significantly affect the probability of failure are different in the three studies.