Katarina Valaskova

The financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on entire economies has been proven. The current necessity is to determine the level of consequences for distinct industries and sectors. The local lockdowns and travel restrictions shocked the hospitality industry and its performance. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explain the effect of the pandemic on a particular economic sector, specifically NACE I (Accommodation and food service activities), and changes in financial indicators in Slovak circumstances for the period 2016–2021. The study focuses on debt ratios that reflect the financial stability of businesses. Friedman’s test was run to determine how the chosen indebtedness indicators developed over the chosen years. Based on a sample of 321 Slovak companies, statistically significant differences were found. But only the interest coverage ratio was significantly different between the pre-pandemic and pandemic eras, according to the post-hoc tests. In addition, there was a hint of a positive overall transformation in the sector of accommodation and food service activities. The decline of the number of enterprises by total indebtedness from the alarming threshold in 2021 declared this fact. The conclusions implicate that Slovak businesses are becoming more mindful of debt financing and are attempting to reduce the risks of going bankrupt.

Acknowledgment
This research was financially supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency – Grant Vega 1/0121/20: Research of transfer pricing system as a tool to measure the performance of national and multinational companies in the context of earnings management in conditions of the Slovak Republic and V4 countries and faculty institutional research 1/KE/2022: Analysis of the determinants of indebtedness and profitability of business entities in the European area.

Further improvement of financial relations at the local level and the development of local budgets take place in the context of financial decentralization. This implies strengthening the role of local governments in attracting necessary financial resources to ensure socio-economic development of territories. The purpose of this paper is to identify the impact of decentralization on the state of local budgets and to develop a scientific and methodological approach to assessing the level of financial decentralization of local budgets using the example of Ukraine for 2010–2019. The developed methodology consists of six successive stages. A comparative analysis of the dynamics of indicators of local budget execution in Ukraine in terms of revenues, expenditures and transfers using an integrated index obtained through taxonomic analysis is conducted. As a result of evaluating the effectiveness of the basic principles of financial decentralization, the expediency of calculating the integrated index of local budget financial decentralization is substantiated. This index is formed using intermediate indicators of autonomy to cover expenses and generate income both on the basis of own sources and taking into account the received state transfers for the implementation of their own and delegated powers of local governments. The implementation of the proposed method allow one to assess the levels of financial decentralization of local budgets to establish the degree of financial autonomy and financial self-sufficiency of the territories. The results obtained should be considered when determining the effectiveness of financial support for local budgets in the process of socio-economic development of regions.

This paper responds to the current issue of Earnings Management (hereafter EM) initiatives in the Visegrad Four. The aim is to identify EM practices and determine a statistically significant relationship between EM practices and firm size, country, or business sector. The paper contains a literature review, bibliometric analysis, and a description of the methods used in the practical part. Many publications containing the term “EM” in scientific databases, a keyword science map for “EM” publications, a science map of the most cited contributions dealing with EM, a science map of countries with the highest number of cited publications with the term “EM”, and a science map of sources with the highest number of publications with the term “EM” are included. The analysis covers the period from 1900 to 2019. The study is focused on detecting the presence of EM initiatives in the Visegrad Four using the modified Jones model. Results confirmed the EM initiatives in the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Poland, and Hungary. Using the one-way ANOVA test, a statistically significant relationship was confirmed between EM practices and firm size, country, and business sector. The study uses a sample of 250 financial statements of entities from each Visegrad Four country for the year 2018. The sample is adjusted for outliers using the IQR method.

Acknowledgment
This paper was financially supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency – Grant No. APVV-17-0546 Variant Comprehensive Model of Earnings Management in Conditions of The Slovak Republic as an Essential Instrument of Market Uncertainty Reduction.