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The purpose of this paper is to examine the linkage between Islamic financing principles and economic growth (EG) by taking into consideration two Islamic Financing Principles: Risk Sharing and non-risk sharing separately.

The data for this study are obtained from the annual reports of all Islamic banks from Bangladesh using Bank scope database and annual report for the period 1984-2014. The research uses an Autoregressive Distributive Lags (ARDL) approach. For robustness, this study also employs a continuous wavelet transform approach.

The empirical findings reveal that the risk sharing instruments are positively related to the EG of the country. On the other hand, non-risk sharing instruments are negatively related to the EG of the country.

The dominant use of non-risk sharing-based financing has undermined the greater possibility of Islamic banking to contribute more to the EG of the country. Banks and other financial institutions need to pay greater attention to systemic risk created by risk transfer and apply risk sharing methods of financing more vigorously to achieve greater equity, efficient allocation of resources, stability and growth of the financial system and welfare of the society as a whole.

This study has advanced the knowledge by examining the issue of Islamic financing principles and EG. This is probably one of the first attempts to find the linkage between Islamic financing principles and EG by taking into consideration two portfolios: risk sharing and non-risk sharing separately and provide significant insights for policy makers, market players and academicians.

On the backdrop of growing importance of Shariah compliant equity markets, the purpose of this paper is to study cross-country portfolio diversification benefits for investors with major trading partners of Saudi Arabia, namely, USA, China, Japan, Germany and India, who have already invested or tend to invest in Saudi Arabian stock market.

The authors have investigated time invariant, dynamic correlations at different investments horizons of the investors among Islamic asset classes by applying relevant econometric techniques like multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic –DCC and continuous wavelet transforms. For robustness, this study also applied maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform.

The findings tend to indicate that the Saudi Arabian investors have portfolio diversification benefits with all major trading partners in the short-term investment horizon. Interestingly, Saudi Arabian market has the least portfolio diversification benefits with the Chinese market. However, in the long run, all markets are correlated, yielding minimum portfolio diversification benefits and most importantly Saudi Arabian investors have portfolio diversification benefits with the Indian Islamic equity market in almost all investment horizons. The findings are highly consistent across different econometric technique estimations.

The authors are only considering five major trading partners of Saudi Arabia. Also, the authors are using S&P and FTSE shari’ah index. Moreover, the time period of the study is constrained by the availability of shari’ah indices. Econometric limitations are also well documented in the literature.

The results could be beneficial for the investors, portfolio managers, hedge fund managers and institutional investors and also could be useful for the policy makers in their policy-making decisions.

Only very few studies have looked into the benefits of international portfolio diversification from the perspective of local investors as well as the portfolio diversification benefits with the major trading partners of Saudi Arabia. One of the novelties of the method is to make the stock investors, practitioners and policy makers aware of the portfolio diversification benefits available at different time scales such as 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 256 trading days as investment holding periods to unveil the true dynamics of co-movement between those different assets.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between capital regulation and risk-taking behavior (financial stability) concerning the impacts of the recent global (COVID-19) crisis and diverse ownership structure.

The analysis uses an unbalanced panel data set from 32 commercial banks of Bangladesh for 2000–2020. The authors use the two-step system generalized method of moments and three-stage least squares to produce the study outcomes.

The robust results reveal that the relationship between capital regulation and risk (financial stability) is negative (positive) and bi-directional. More significantly, COVID-19 makes banks fragile and demands more capital to absorb risk. However, the effect of COVID-19 is heterogeneous when the authors consider ownership structure. Among the diverse ownership styles, Islamic and active shareholding show their controlling wheel on capital regulation and risk-taking aptitude (financial stability) during the global (COVID-19) crisis. In normal economic conditions, private banks and minority active shareholding can be a good determinant for capital regulation and risk (financial stability). On the other hand, state-owned and large banks have been found as less capitalized and highly risky.

This study is the pioneer in exploring capital regulation and risk toward the recent global (COVID-19) crisis.

Economic hardship and crime is always a debatable issue in the political economy literature. Some authors define poverty leads to crime some are completely opposite. The purpose of this paper is to find out the impact of poverty on crime in the USA.

Using time series data of USA over the period from 1965 to 2016, this study applies autoregressive distributed lag approach to identify the effect of poverty on crime.

The outcomes confirm a positive co-integrating relationship between poverty and property crime. It can be argued that poverty ultimately leads property crime in long run in the USA. However, unemployment and GDP exhibit neither long-run nor short-run relationship with property crime and they are not cointegrated for the calculated period.

The subject of this paper helps to explain and analyze the nexus between poverty and crime in the USA.

Government and policymakers should focus more on poverty rather than unemployment alone to control property crime.

This study attempts to identify the consequences of economic hardship and poverty on the crime in the advanced economy like USA.

The purpose of the study is to find out the impact of Digital Financial Inclusion (DFI) on economic growth [(Industrial Production Index (INDP)] of Bangladesh.

Using the monthly data over the period 2018 M12 to 2021 M12, this study applied the Auto-regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to assess the effect of DFI indicators on INDP. The secondary data was collected from the Bangladesh Bank and CEIC Global Economic Data.

The study found that the majority of DFI indicators are positively associated with INDP. From the short-run ARDL, it is seen that one unit positive increase in Point of Sales Transactions (POST) can increase the INDP by 0.055 units. From the long-run ARDL, it is seen that POST and e-commerce transactions (ECOMT) have a significant positive impact, while Automated Teller Machine Transactions (ATMT) have a significant negative effect on INDP. One unit increase in POST and ECOMT increases INDP by 0.13544 and 0.11611 units, respectively.

During the era of the fourth industrial revolution, the findings will be beneficial for policymakers, financial technology service providers, manufacturers, consumers, corporations and investors as they pave the way for a more inclusive approach to financial transactions for economic growth.

The study’s novelty is that it explored the influential DFI indicators and shed light on both short-run and long-run relationships between the indicators and macro-economy from the context of a developing nation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2023-0306

This study aims to investigate public sentiment toward economic stimulus using textual analysis. Specifically, it analyzes Twitter’s public opinion, emotion-based sentiment and topics related to COVID-19 economic stimulus packages.

This study applies natural language processing techniques, such as sentiment analysis, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding and semantic network analysis, to a global data set of 88,441 tweets from January 2020 to December 2021 extracted from the Twitter platform, discussing COVID-19 economic stimulus packages.

Results show that in the fourth quarter of 2021, there is a declining trend of positive sentiment (−5%) and an increasing trend of negative sentiment (14%), which may indicate the perceived inadequacy of COVID-19 stimulus measures. Topic modeling identifies seven topics, highlighting the necessity of stimulus in the education sector.

The big-data findings of this study provide a better understanding of public sentiment about economic stimulus for regulators and policymakers, which can help in formulating more effective fiscal and monetary policies.

Public sentiment is a significant concern for regulators because of its associated ambiguity, such as how to design stimulus packages and evaluate the effectiveness of previous measures. This study applies natural language processing, contributing to the growing literature on designing effective economic stimulus.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of financial development (FD) on economic growth and growth-enhancing transmission channels for the sub-Saharan African (SSA) region in three different periods: the pre-Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) era (1990–1999), during the MDGs (2000–2017) era and the main period (1990–2017).

The study used the system generalized method of moments (SGMM) approach on 45 SSA countries from 1990 to 2017, using the data collected from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The long-run effect of the study showed mixed results in pre-MDGs and during MDGs periods but was positive in the main period. For growth-enhancing transmission channels, the results were mixed, although in many cases, institutional (INST) quality, human capital (HC) and foreign direct investment (FDI) were the main transmission channels.

Some of the countries were dropped from the analysis due to data inadequacy.

The empirical results of this study provide evidence that the financial sector has robust positive effect throughout 1990–2017. Furthermore, the financial sector depends on several factors to improve economic growth. The SSA region has to focus on improving HC, INST quality in terms of good governance and create environment that is attractive to FDI since they were the main growth-enhancing channels.

Most of the studies in SSA countries assessed the direct effect of FD on economic growth without considering its transmission channels in different time frames. Moreover, they often used specific variables but not the financial index. This study extended the scope by considering various financial sector transmission channels, in different time periods and the financial index.

Corporate corruption reporting (CCR) is an emerging issue of the corporation for measuring transparency, integrity and accountability to the stakeholders and society. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of CCR and financial management responsibility regarding the issue of corruption control.

To explore the influences of corruption disclosure, this study considers the keywords-based content analysis of the listed financial firms of the Dhaka Stock Exchange in Bangladesh for 2012–2016. The research considers stakeholders and theoretical legitimacy lens for discussing corporate corruption disclosure. This study identified 143 self-driven keywords by classifying, analyzing and selecting the appropriate large set of keywords from the prior literature. This study examines 247 firm-year observations of all financial firms in Bangladesh using secondary data sources.

The results of the hierarchical regression analysis report that financial firms following Sharia principles have a negative and significant association with CCR, while Big4 has a positive and significant influence. Moreover, the interaction effect of Big4 on the relationship between Sharia principles and CCR is negative and insignificant. The findings reported that Islamic financial firms disclose less corruption information than conventional financial firms in Bangladesh.

This study findings are expected to significantly impact corporate management and policymakers of developing and highly corrupted economies to enhance corporate accountability, transparency and reputation. The regulatory body can consider the findings to promulgate anti-corruption reporting rules and regulations.

The authors believe the theoretical lens used to support the method and findings of this paper are unique and novel.

The purpose of this study primarily is to investigate the heterogeneous effect of leverage on performance of the listed nonfinancial joint stock companies in Bangladesh.

A large panel sample of 165 listed nonfinancial firms under different industries of Bangladesh studied for the period 2007–2016 employing the dynamic panel approaches, namely, differenced generalized method of moments (GMM) and system GMM. The asymmetric relationship between leverage and performance is also examined by quantile regression approach.

GMM showed that the leverage indicators have the negative impact on the performance of the firms in terms of return on equity and return on asset while the quantile regressions revealed the heterogeneous relationship between leverage and profitability. It showed that greater negative impact of leverage on performance in high-profitable firms than low-profitable firms.

The study is confined to only the listed nonfinancial joint-stock companies of Bangladesh.

The asymmetric relationship between leverage and financial performance identified in this study would be the helpful tool for financial managers for optimal capital structure decisions.

This is one of the first in-depth attempts to find the nonlinear heterogeneous effect of leverage on firms' performance.

Owing to religious and economic preferences in Muslim-dominated countries, middle-income customers are at the heart of banks’ strategic targeting. This study aims to investigate selected middle-income Islamic bank customers from Sylhet, one of Bangladesh’s top religious and cultural cities, to examine their perceptions of the Islamic banking services.

This study forwards three determinants of overall satisfaction. These are perceived relative advantage (PRA), perceived risk management (PRM) and perceived customer engagement (PCE). The study has used structured questionnaire and collected complete data on 300 middle-income Islamic bank users. The data was analysed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM).

While all the three selection factors significantly influence overall satisfaction, PCE has greater positive impact on overall customer satisfaction, followed by PRA and PRM. “Convenient location”, “competitive charges” and “return on deposit despite low earnings” are the top three instruments measuring “PCE”. Religion did not qualify as a standalone selection factor. The results are robust across tests conducted by using EFA, CFA and SEM.

Gross purchasing power of middle-income class in Bangladesh grew from 7% to over 30% during the past decade, and the purchasing power of this class stood at US$100bn. Having a greater portion of this population as Muslims, banks can design products and marketing campaigns by using the three selection criteria that offer a combination of faith and non-faith-based variables.

Similar studies on the middle-income customer group have been rare, especially from the Islamic banking perspective. These findings offer a concise list of three factors for the bank managers to build their strategies. With respect to the Vision 2021, these findings carry greater socio-economic significance given the transition of Bangladesh to a middle-income country.