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This study explores the adoption of crowdfunding in Pakistan, focusing on the challenges and opportunities within its unique entrepreneurial ecosystem. The research aims to provide insights into the regulatory mechanisms, stakeholder engagement and institutional factors influencing crowdfunding adoption.

Seventeen semi-structured interviews were conducted using a purposive sampling technique. Data was collected from diverse stakeholders involved in the crowdfunding process including investors, entrepreneurs, platform owners and regulators.

The study identifies various challenges, including regulatory gaps, investor concerns, platform-related issues and systemic challenges such as political instability and weak institutions. These challenges hinder the effective implementation of crowdfunding in Pakistan. Moreover, the study highlights opportunities for financial inclusion, bridging the gap between investors and entrepreneurs, and leveraging Pakistan’s entrepreneurial landscape for crowdfunding growth. While several challenges were common to both developed and developing countries, the study also identified distinct challenges such as digital literacy, reliance on the undocumented economy, insufficient regulatory frameworks and investor mindset specific to developing countries.

Since crowdfunding is an emerging phenomenon in Pakistan, this study had limitations as no official crowdfunding platform other than the Pakistan National Investor Portal had started operations. Therefore, this study involved only those stakeholders who were involved in designing regulatory sandbox suggestions. The sample size could be increased to include stakeholders from other developing countries in the future. This article, however, provides significant strategic guidance for policymakers in developing a framework to improve financial inclusion in development.

The study provides critical areas of concern for regulatory authorities for developing appropriate legislation to help overcome the challenges to the institutionalization of crowdfunding. This study also encourages stakeholders like investors and entrepreneurs to participate in crowdfunding while looking at the perspective of other parties.

This research highlights the need for the Pakistani society to be well-informed about alternative investment opportunities, like crowdfunding. The micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector, along with the government, can also explore the benefits of crowdfunding to address their lack of access to capital and enable the inclusion of an informal economy to reduce poverty in a developing country.

Crowdfunding is a new phenomenon in Pakistan, and the scope of its application in the MSME sector has not been thoroughly investigated. This study reveals how micro and small firms can use crowdfunding to boost their economic operations by overcoming challenges and taking advantage of fintech (financial technology) to achieve financial inclusion, leading to economic sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on micro-businesses owned by women borrowers of microfinance institutions and to provide policy suggestions to assist women entrepreneurs in managing such an unexpected crisis from a qualitative perspective within developing countries such as Pakistan.

The study adopts a qualitative research design to explore the impact of COVID-19 on women’s entrepreneurial activities. Seven women entrepreneurs were selected and semi-structured interviews with focused group discussion under case study research design are used. Thereby providing a contemporary view of the issues faced by women entrepreneurs in the period of huge social and economic upheaval.

The results provide valuable insights about how the COVID-19 crisis affected women entrepreneurs by particularly considering household income, business sales, lifestyle and mental health. The liquidation of women-led businesses indicated the necessity to reconsider creativity and digitalization for business survival. Moreover, the results also revealed that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the physical, mental and economic well-being of women highlights the need for considering gender gap issues in forming response policies for COVID-19 in developing countries.

As the COVID-19 crisis is a recent and existing phenomenon, this study is among the first to explore particularly the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on micro-enterprises mainly owned and managed by women. Thereby claiming that COVID-19 not only physically but also psychologically affected women entrepreneurs. Moreover, the study highlights a need of skill focused training programs for women entrepreneurs to make sure that they can protect their businesses during such difficult times.

The purpose of this study is to examine the influences of informal organisational and family support on work-family conflict (WFC) and its subsequent impact on turnover intentions among female employees.

To evaluate the WFC among female individuals, data were collected through a questionnaire distributed among female employees in the service sector in Lahore, Pakistan, by using convenience-sampling technique. The collected data were analysed through a well-known statistical technique, SEM, using AMOS software.

The findings suggest that supports (informal organizational and family) have no impact to resolving the issues of WFC arising because of female members of the family working. Also, it was found that WFC is positively linked to employee turnover intentions.

By addressing WFC issues, this research has key implication for WFC practically. This study has essential implications for organization, so it can reduce the WFC by creating a supportive environment to create balance amongst work and family life. Specifically, managers need to be aware of the impact that social support and WFC have on turnover intention.

This study provides the model of WFC that helps in future research. The research also improves past studies’ methodology by testing the direct and mediation impacts between the constructs specifically in female employees. This study is a valuable addition to the existing body of literature.

Based on the arguments of conservation of resource theory (COR), this study aims to investigate the mechanism underlying the linkage of COVID fear, work-family conflict (W-FC) and family-work conflict (F-WC) while investigating the mediating role of COVID stress and social distancing. The study also tests the moderating role of religiosity in these relationships.

In total, 401 survey responses from doctors and university teachers are collected through online and personally administrated questionnaires. Partial least square-based structural equation modeling technique is applied using Smart PLS software.

This study finds that COVID fear has a positive and significant impact on COVID stress and social distancing while religiosity negatively impacts COVID fear. Further, COVID stress and social distancing mediates the relationships between COVID fear and W-FC/ F-WC. However, the study found that COVID stress is a more effective mechanism as compared to social distancing in explaining the mediation process. It is also found that religiosity significantly moderates the nexus between COVID stress and both W-FC and F-WC negatively.

Findings imply that the teachers, as well as doctors, must be immediately be provided with the proper facilitation to maintain their work from home operations with the best of the institutional facilities. Moreover, the recruitment policy in such professions can also consider religious practices to be the indicators of problem-solving and stress management in such a challenging context.

This study provides timely and novel insight into the interplay between the domains of work and family during the period of stressful COVID outbreak. By distinguishing W-FC and F-WC, it provides a detailed understanding of the process during the COVID period. The groundbreaking finding in the research is with the moderation of religiosity.

This study proposes a new comprehensive model of entrepreneurial intentions (EIs) that enhances the understanding of the crucial entrepreneurial personality traits. This study also examines how entrepreneurial family history, gender and discipline moderate the relationship between the key entrepreneurial personality traits and EIs of university students.

The study introduces a new combination of important entrepreneurial personality traits, theoretically following the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). The data are collected using an entrepreneurial intention questionnaire and analysed with structural equation modelling (SEM) over a sample of 297 university students from Pakistan.

The findings highlight that one of the notable contributions to assessing EI is the negative impact of foreseeable challenges (FCs), resulting in negative EIs among university students of our sample. The authors also found significant moderating roles of gender, discipline and entrepreneurial family history in strengthening the relationship between entrepreneurial traits and EIs.

The study contributes both to the existing empirical and theoretical literature by examining a key set of entrepreneurial personality traits leading to enhance EIs. The results may also assist academicians to discover new ways for developing entrepreneurial traits among university students.

Employee position is acknowledged as central in service brand management to achieve competitive advantage. Hence, this study aims to illustrate the importance of brand role clarity (BRC) and employee brand commitment (EBC) by investigating the moderating role of EBC on the relationship between BRC and employee brand equity (EBE) in Islamic banking.

Data is collected from 259 respondents who are involved in Islamic banking. Proportionate stratified random sampling was used to select bank branches for the study, and simple random sampling was adopted to choose respondents within these bank branches.

Building on the insight obtained from data analysis, the results of this study demonstrate that the EBC strengthens the significant relationship between employee BRC and EBE. It indicates that EBC is vital in affecting the employee BRC on EBE.

The importance of BRC and EBC has been widely discussed in the literature that both of these variables are essential sources of EBE. However, empirical studies on the combined effect of EBC and BRC on EBE have not been considered in past studies.

Spam emails classification using data mining and machine learning approaches has enticed the researchers' attention duo to its obvious positive impact in protecting internet users. Several features can be used for creating data mining and machine learning based spam classification models. Yet, spammers know that the longer they will use the same set of features for tricking email users the more probably the anti-spam parties might develop tools for combating this kind of annoying email messages. Spammers, so, adapt by continuously reforming the group of features utilized for composing spam emails. For that reason, even though traditional classification methods possess sound classification results, they were ineffective for lifelong classification of spam emails duo to the fact that they might be prone to the so-called “Concept Drift”. In the current study, an enhanced model is proposed for ensuring lifelong spam classification model. For the evaluation purposes, the overall performance of the suggested model is contrasted against various other stream mining classification techniques. The results proved the success of the suggested model as a lifelong spam emails classification method.

This paper aims to enhance the existing literature on adaptive market hypothesis (AMH) as this study first time links the month of Ramadan with AMH that permits the performance of well-known Ramadan effect to fluctuate over time.

To fulfill the purpose, the authors inspect the daily returns of 107 individual firms listed at Pakistan Stock Exchange over the period of 20 years. To explore the varying degree of return predictability during Ramadan, the authors use four different subsamples comprising equal length of observations of five years each. The authors use a GARCH (1,1) regression model which facilitates for time varying nature of volatility in equity returns. To facilitate the non-normal nature of stock return data, the authors use Kruskal–Wallis test statistic.

The authors find that behavior of Ramadan effect evolves over time, as performance of this effect varies from time to time and consistent with AMH. Finally, the paper proposes that AMH is well elucidation of behavior of Ramadan effect than traditional efficient market hypothesis.

First limitation is related to the choice of sub-sample as the study uses a sub-sample of five years. Second, the authors ignore transection cost (commissions, fee and taxes) as it is freely negotiated and varies between 4 and 10% (Khan, 2013). Due to such varying information we ignore the transaction cost. It is suggested that a sub-sample analysis of long period may be a more appropriate method to elucidate the idea of AMH in future research and suggest the current method could be adapted and helpful to examine other calendar and market anomalies in different equity markets.

The paper includes implications for investors to choose a better model for investment. Investors can exploit greater returns in future month of Ramadan periods. Furthermore, the researchers can easily extend the methodology used in the study to address multiple issues like adaptive behavior of returns from bonds, real estate investment trusts, cryptocurrencies and trading rules of strategies.

Study confirms from sample t-test and GARCH (1,1) model that Ramadan effect is present in the full and in certain sub-samples; therefore, based on these discrepancies investors can earn abnormal returns by developing specific investment strategies as investors usually make investments in share according to the religious context of Islamic Calendar. The results provide good references for suitable time of investment in stock market. The findings of this study will be helpful to investors and brokers as well as portfolio managers to capture favorable returns across the Islamic calendar.

The paper identified need to study why behavior of Ramadan effect varies over time. The data set comprises daily returns of 107 individual companies over the period of 20 years to better investigate the varying nature of anomalous effect of month of Ramadan. The findings are valuable for international investors and portfolio managers.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the factors that attract (pull) or discourage (push) Palestinian students from Israel (PSI) to study at a Palestinian university, the Arab American University in Jenin (AAUJ), for the first time since the establishment of Israel in 1948.

A qualitative research method using in-depth interviews with 15 PSI who study at AAUJ attempts to define the motivations behind PSI preferring AAUJ, on one hand, and constraints, on the other hand.

The findings of the study show factors that attract PSI to study at the AAUJ and what subjects they choose to study there, the encounter with a similar culture and nationalism in a Palestinian campus in the occupied West Bank; the most significant difficulties and impediments they face there, whether economic or political, are discussed. This paper contributes to an understanding of the new national re-encounter between two Palestinian groups in a university campus, one under Israel’s occupation and the other that has Israeli citizenship.

It is a unique phenomenon in the trends of international students’ mobility in the world.