Ghaeli, Mohammad R.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the existing risks for the offshore project and risk weighting using the fuzzy best worst method (FBWM). In offshore oil projects, we face six major risks. Each of these risks is divided into smaller risks leaving us to have a total of 34 risks. Some of these risks are internal and some are external risks. In this method, first, the experts of this field determined the best and the worst type of risk. Then, using the experts’ opinions, the study compared the remaining risks with the two selected risks and the other weights are determined. In our survey, “Technical Risk and Project Execution” is the most important risk factor followed by “Political Risk and Sanctions”, “Market risk”, “Management risk”, “Financial risk and currency fluctuations” and “Environmental risk”.

One of the primary tools for asset evaluation on stock market is to use price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. The method is simple and has become popular among many investors for buy/sell decisions. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review on recent advances on the use of P/E ratio for measuring other firms’ characteristics. The survey has reviewed several studies on the relationship between P/E ratio and stock performance, estimation of transaction data, insider transaction, future growth, firm size, interest ratio, book-to-market equity, etc.

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is one of the most popular methods used for measuring the relative efficiency of similar units by considering various input/output parameters. This paper implements DEA models to estimate the relative efficiency of selected banks in the United States. The proposed study uses two inputs, total assets and number of employees, and one output, net revenue for measuring the relative efficiency of selected banks. The relative efficiencies of different banks are analyzed. The preliminary results indicate that Santander Bank is the most efficient banks operating in the United States followed by SunTrust Bank and HSBC. Other banks preserve lower efficiency compared with these three banks.

Supply chain management (SCM) is the active centralize of a business' supply related activities to increase customer value and enhance a competitive advantage in the marketplace. SCM includes various efforts by suppliers to implement and effective supply chains which are as economical as possible. Supply chain includes several issues from production, to product development, to the information systems required to direct these undertakings. This paper presents recent advances of supply chain management and issues related in Canadian industries. According to our survey, trust is an important part of the supply chain and business partners. The study also discusses different challenges for the implementation of SCM in Canadian small and medium enterprises.

Graphical evaluation and review techniques (GERT) is a technique to study the stochastic nature of networks consists of different branches. In GERT, all branches are explained in terms of the probability that the branch is traversed and the tile to traverse the branch in case it is realized. This paper presents recent advances of the implementation of GERT in various industries. The study presents a comprehensive description of GERT and recent advances on the implementation of GERT in various industries over the period 2002-2017.

Risk management plays an important role on the success of the any project. There are several techniques, which are available to help different phases of risk management process. This paper presents a survey to identify the necessary tools, which are mostly implemented and related to the success of any project management, and more specifically with effective project risk management. The survey is based on a questionnaire designed to a sample of project managers from the construction industries. The response data was studied to determine which tools are more used in the organizations, which could yield a better project management performance.

During the past three decades, data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been successfully used for measuring the relative efficiency of financial or non-financial firms. This paper presents an empirical investigation to measure the relative efficiency of five Canadian banks versus 6 US big banks using DEA method. The study considers the number of employees and total assets as input and net revenue is used as the output of the DEA model. The data are collected from the official statements of the banks for the fiscal year of 2017. The results indicate that 6 US banks maintained an average efficiency of 0.87 but the average efficiency of Canadian banks was 0.72. While two US banks maintained an efficiency of one, the other US banks demonstrate relatively well in terms of the performance. In Canada, while one bank performed relatively well, the performance of the other Canadian banks were not as good as the US banks.

This paper presents an overview on recent studies on the role of gender in corporate governance. We study the recent works on the relationship between gender and firms’ financial performance as well as the relationship between gender and firms’ interest in global warming. According to our survey, it appears that firms with the presence of females had more concerns on green gas effects than other male oriented corporations did. Moreover, according to our survey, when a female member joins the board of directors, most investors consider this as a positive signal for profitability. In other words, it appears that the presence of female contributes to firm’s financial performance.