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The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of the Ukraine–Russia military conflict on the returns and investment flows of equity funds across multiple countries.

Using a comprehensive sample of 1,281 equity funds in 40 countries. The countries were segregated into conflict states, members of NATO, and those which abstained from voting on the UN resolution on March 2, 2022. The authors employ a GARCH-based event study and estimate CARs for t−5, t−3, t, t + 3, and t + 5 event windows. Further, the authors use panel estimation to assess the link between the CARs and the investment exposure of the sample funds.

The findings highlight an adverse reaction of mutual funds in Russia, Ukraine, and the NATO States. On the contrary, the mutual funds in the countries that abstained during the voting on the UN resolution on March 2nd posted positive abnormal returns. Similarly, the investment exposure towards the conflicted countries and NATO states is unfavorable except for the abstained countries.

This is the primary study to evaluate the impact of the recent geopolitical tensions on mutual funds domiciled across various geographical locations.

This article aims to uncover the impact of Google Trends on cryptocurrency markets beyond Bitcoin during the time of increased attention to altcoins, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper analyses the nexus among the Google Trends and six cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin, New Economy Movement (NEM), Dash, Ethereum, Ripple and Litecoin by utilizing the causality-in-quantiles technique on data comprised of the years January 2016–March 2021.

The findings show that Google Trends cause the Litecoin, Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum and NEM prices at majority of the quantiles except for Dash.

The findings will help investors to develop more in-depth understanding of impact of Google Trends on cryptocurrency prices and build successful trading strategies in a more matured digital assets ecosystem.

(1) A concern often expressed in relation to cryptocurrencies is the environmental impact associated with increasing energy consumption and mining pollution. Controversy remains regarding how environmental attention and public concerns adversely affect cryptocurrency prices. Therefore, the paper aims to introduce the index of cryptocurrency environmental attention (ICEA), which aims to capture the relative extent of media discussions surrounding the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. (2) The impacts of cryptocurrency environmental attention on long-term macro-financial markets and economic development remain part of undeveloped research fields. Based on these factors, the paper will further examine the effects of the ICEA on financial markets or economic developments.

(1) The paper introduces a new index to capture cryptocurrency environmental attention in terms of the cryptocurrency response to major related events through gathering a large amount of news stories around cryptocurrency environmental concerns – i.e. >778.2 million news items from the LexisNexis News & Business database, which can be considered as Big Data – and analysing that rich dataset using variety of quantitative techniques. (2) The vector error correction model (VECM) and structural VECM (SVECM) [impulse response function (IRF), forecast error variance decomposition (FEVD) and historical decomposition (HD)] are useful for characterising the dynamic relationships between ICEA and aggregate economic activities.

(1) The paper has developed a new measure of attention to sustainability concerns of cryptocurrency markets' growth, ICEA. (2) ICEA has a significantly positive relationship with the UCRY indices, volatility index (VIX), Brent crude oil (BCO) and Bitcoin. (3) ICEA has a significantly negative relationship with the global economic policy uncertainty (GlobalEPU) and global temperature uncertainty (GTU). Moreover, ICEA has a significantly positive relationship with the industrial production (IP) in the short term, whilst having a significantly negative relationship in the long term. (4) The HD of the ICEA displays higher linkages between environmental attention, Bitcoin and UCRY indices around key events that significantly change the prices of digital assets.

The ICEA is significant in the analysis of whether cryptocurrency markets are sustainable regarding energy consumption requirements and negative contributions to climate change. Understanding of the broader impacts of cryptocurrency environmental concerns on cryptocurrency market volatility, uncertainty and environmental sustainability should be considered and developed. Moreover, the paper aims to point out future research and policy legislation directions. Notably, the paper poses the question of how cryptocurrency can be made more sustainable and environmentally friendly and how governments' cryptocurrency policies can address the cryptocurrency markets.

(1) The paper develops a cryptocurrency environmental attention index based on news coverage that captures the extent to which environmental sustainability concerns are discussed in conjunction with cryptocurrencies. (2) The paper empirically investigates the impacts of cryptocurrency environmental attention on other financial or economic variables [cryptocurrency uncertainty (UCRY) indices, Bitcoin, VIX, GlobalEPU, BCO, GTU index and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development IP index]. (3) The paper provides insights into making the most effective use of online databases in the development of new indices for financial research.

Whilst blockchain technology has a number of useful implications and has great potential to transform several industries, issues of high-energy consumption and CO2 pollution regarding cryptocurrency have become some of the main areas of criticism, raising questions about the sustainability of cryptocurrencies. These results are essential for both policy-makers and for academics, since the results highlight an urgent need for research addressing the key issues, such as the growth of carbon produced in the creation of this new digital currency. The results also are important for investors concerned with the ethical implications and environmental impacts of their investment choices.

(1) The paper provides an efficient new proxy for cryptocurrency and robust empirical evidence for future research concerning the impact of environmental issues on cryptocurrency markets. (2) The study successfully links cryptocurrency environmental attention to the financial markets, economic developments and other volatility and uncertainty measures, which has certain novel implications for the cryptocurrency literature. (3) The empirical findings of the paper offer useful and up-to-date insights for investors, guiding policy-makers, regulators and media, enabling the ICEA to evolve into a barometer in the cryptocurrency era and play a role in, for example, environmental policy development and investment portfolio optimisation.

This study comprehensively aims to review the key influential and intellectual aspects of spillovers between Islamic and conventional financial markets.

The study uses the bibliometric and content analysis methods using the VOSviewer software to analyse 52 academic documents derived from the Web of Sciences (WoS) between 2015 and June 2022.

The results demonstrate the influential aspects of spillovers between Islamic and conventional financial markets, including the leading authors, journals, countries and institutions and the intellectual aspects of literature. These aspects are synthesised into four main streams: research between stock indexes; studies between stock indexes, oil and precious metal; works between Sukuk, bond and indexes; and empirical studies review. The authors also propose future research directions in spillovers between Islamic and conventional financial markets.

Our study is subject to several limitations. Firstly, the authors only used the WoS database. Secondly, the study only includes papers and reviews written in English from the WoS. This study assists academic scholars, practitioners and regulatory bodies in further exploring the suggested issues in future studies and improving and predicting economic and financial stability.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no extant empirical studies have been conducted in this area of research interest.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the literature around regulatory compliance and market manipulation in capital markets through the use of bibliometrics and propose future research directions. Under the domain of capital markets, this theme is a niche area of research where greater academic investigations are required. Most of the research is fragmented and limited to a few conventional aspects only. To address this gap, this study engages in a large-scale systematic literature review approach to collect and analyze the research corpus in the post-2000 era.

The big data corpus comprising research articles has been extracted from the scientific Scopus database and analyzed using the VoSviewer application. The literature around the subject has been presented using bibliometrics to give useful insights on the most popular research work and articles, top contributing journals, authors, institutions and countries leading to identification of gaps and potential research areas.

Based on the review, this study concludes that, even in an era of global market integration and disruptive technological advancements, many important aspects of this subject remain significantly underexplored. Over the past two decades, research has lagged behind the evolution of capital market crime and market regulations. Finally, based on the findings, the study suggests important future research directions as well as a few research questions. This includes market manipulation, market regulations and new-age technologies, all of which could be very useful to researchers in this field and generate key inputs for stock market regulators.

The limitation of this research is that it is based on Scopus database so the possibility of omission of some literature cannot be completely ruled out. More advanced machine learning techniques could be applied to decode the finer aspects of the studies undertaken so far.

Increased integration among global markets, fast-paced technological disruptions and complexity of financial crimes in stock markets have put immense pressure on market regulators. As economies and equity markets evolve, good research investigations can aid in a better understanding of market manipulation and regulatory compliance. The proposed research directions will be very useful to researchers in this field as well as generate key inputs for stock market regulators to deal with market misbehavior.

This study has adopted a period-wise broad-based scientific approach to identify some of the most pertinent gaps in the subject and has proposed practical areas of study to strengthen the literature in the said field.

This study examines the prediction power of investor sentiment on Bitcoin return.

We construct a Financial and Economic Attitudes Revealed by Search (FEARS) index using search volume from Google's search engine to reveal household-level (“bankruptcy”, “unemployment”, “job search”, etc.) and market-level sentiment (“bankruptcy”, “unemployment”, “job search”, etc.).

Using a variety of quantitative methodologies such as the transfer entropy model as well as threshold regression and OLS, GLS and 2SLS estimations, we find that (1) investor sentiment has strong predictive power on Bitcoin, (2) household-level sentiment has larger effects than market-level sentiment and (3) the impact of sentiment is greater in low sentiment regimes than in high sentiment regimes. Based on these information, we build a hypothetical trading strategy that outperforms a simple buy-and-hold strategy both on an absolute and risk-adjusted basis. The results are consistent across cryptocurrencies and regions.

The findings contribute to the ongoing debate in the literature on the efficiency of cryptocurrency markets. The results reveal that the Bitcoin market is not efficient in the sense of the efficient market hypothesis – asset prices do not fully reflect all available information and we were able to “beat the market”. In addition, it sheds further light on the debate whether Bitcoin can be considered a medium of exchange, i.e. a currency or an investment product. Because investors are reallocating their Bitcoin holdings during times of increased market sentiment due to liquidity needs, they obviously consider bitcoin an investment product rather than a currency.

This study is the first to examine the impact of investor sentiment measured by FEARS on Bitcoin return.