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The purpose of this paper is to assist bank regulators in Africa who are currently considering the implementation of Basel III countercyclical capital buffer (CCB) requirement.

Using a panel data set of 129 commercial banks operating in 14 African countries over the period 2004–2014, this paper estimates the system generalized method of moments regression to examine the impact of business cycle on banks’ regulatory capital buffers and attempts to identify the influence of bank revenue diversification, market power and cost of funding (CF) on bank regulatory capital buffers. It further carries out some robustness analyses using a panel data set of 257 commercial banks in 23 African countries over the period 2004–2014.

The results show that higher regulatory capital buffers are associated with higher market power, higher revenue diversification and higher CF. Additionally, the results show significant evidence of procyclical behavior of bank capital buffers (BUFs) in the sampled countries.

The results of this study suggest that African banking systems are not exposed to contagion and systemic risks arising from countercyclical movements of BUFs to the real economy. Therefore, this study does not support the implementation of the Basel III CCB requirement in the sampled African countries.

Considering that the results of existing studies on the cyclical behavior of BUFs are inconclusive, there is value in studying the cyclical movements of bank regulatory capital buffers in a set of countries that has not been analyzed before. Toward this direction, this is the first empirical study focusing on the cyclical behavior of bank regulatory capital buffers in Africa. Besides examining the cyclical behavior of bank regulatory capital buffers, this paper further investigates the effects of bank revenue diversification, market power and CF on bank regulatory capital buffers.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of 191 equity unit trusts in an emerging market, South Africa over the period from February 2006 to January 2016, which captures different market conditions (pre-global financial crisis, crisis and recovery periods). Besides testing for managerial ability, both cross-sectional regression and the non-parametric rank correlation test are used to test whether the performance generated by unit trusts does persist.

To evaluate the managerial ability of portfolio managers, two widely used methods, the Treynor-Mazuy (1966) model and Henriksson-Merton (1981) model, are employed. Both models test whether portfolio managers have stock selection and market timing ability. The cross-sectional regression and the rank correlation test are implemented which account for both parametric and non-parametric approaches of persistence testing, respectively.

Weak evidence of stock selection as well as market timing ability was found. Moreover, most of the unit trusts are reported to have insignificant coefficients. When testing for performance persistence using returns, the Sharpe ratio and the Sortino ratio as performance metrics, the overall results also revealed weak evidence of persistence that is equally spread across winning and losing funds.

While research on unit trusts’ performance has been conducted in emerging economies, little has been done in testing for managerial ability in general and in South Africa in particular. Moreover, the research tends to focus more on one class – Equity General. This paper extends the performance literature by testing whether portfolio managers in the South African equity unit trusts industry have stock selection and market timing ability.

This paper reviews economic and finance research on Islamic investments. In the course of our review, we focus on the following issues: the performance of Islamic stock indexes, Islamic finance–growth nexus and Islamic real-estate investment trust market.

This literature survey consists of two stages such as random and systematic. It begins with a random search of articles with the intention to explore the three different areas of Islamic banking and finance. In order to maintain some level of quality of the literature review, we explored inside citations of articles based on relevant and recent articles from SCOPUS and Web of Science.

This paper represents an attempt to organise current research on Islamic stock markets, Islamic finance-growth nexus and Islamic real-estate finance: (1) the first prevailing finding is that Islamic stock indices are less volatile than conventional stock indices; (2) most empirical studies regarding Islamic finance–growth nexus focus on the impacts of banking sectors on growth and neglect other segments of the Islamic financial market; (3) based on our review of existing studies, there is no unanimous model for Islamic home financing in Islamic banks.

The mixed findings in this area hinder the understanding of Islamic investment and prevent identifying trends that support decision-making. Our review provides suggestions for prospective research directions. Most empirical studies regarding Islamic finance–growth nexus focus on the impacts of banking sectors on growth and neglect other segments of the Islamic financial market.

There is no literature review on Islamic finance-growth nexus and Islamic real-estate literature. Therefore, we are going to fill this gap to review these three different aspects of Islamic banking and finance.