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This paper aims to identify the key drivers of US sustainable stock price movements in both the short and long term, deploying a rich collection of variables corresponding to green finance, investor attention and sentiment, market fear and uncertainty, macroeconomic variables, common market risk factors, commodity markets and the carbon emission market.

The empirical analysis is based on two main methodologies. First, the elastic net penalized regression is utilized to select the factors most influential on the price formation of sustainable stocks. Second, short- and long-run dynamics of the chosen factors are examined using the dynamic simulations of the autoregressive distributed lag (DYNARDL) model.

Of 32 candidate variables, the elastic net chooses US renewable energy, European sustainable stock market, EU ETS emission allowances, public attention to sustainable finance, gold and European renewable energy as the most contributing factors to the price behavior of sustainable stocks. The DYNARDL estimation results reveal that US renewable energy, European sustainable stock market and EU ETS emission allowances are important determinants in the short and long term, while public attention (European renewable energy) tends to affect sustainable stock prices only in the short (long) run.

The corresponding short- and long-run effects of US renewable energy, EU ETS emission allowances and European sustainable stocks on US sustainable stock prices should induce policymakers to keep the price behavior of these factors under systematic review. The formulation of policy measures could serve to safeguard the sustainable stock market from the price vagaries in these influential markets.

Relevant literature often focuses on the reaction of sustainable stocks to mainstream assets and risk proxies, limiting analysis to a few factors and providing an incomplete understanding of the drivers behind sustainable stock prices. More comprehensive research is needed due to the lack of studies on the determinants of sustainable stock prices and the growing global demand for these investments. This paper aims to address this gap by examining the potential explanatory power of 32 candidate factors representing key players in the global economic and financial landscape.

Public interest in global events has become a robust driver of investor behavior and market dynamics. This paper assesses the potential influence of attention to the 2023 Israel–Palestine war on the Tel Aviv stock market performance. Our investigation includes both the aggregate market and major sectors.

Leveraging the Google Trends service, we track search interest for a rich list of 20 terms closely linked to the ongoing conflict. Subsequently, we employ principal component analysis to construct a proxy indicator for war-related attention. To examine the potential influence of this attention on stock price returns and volatility, we adopt an EGARCH-X(p, q) framework, incorporating proxy factors to mitigate potential model under-specification issues.

The results suggest that increased attention to Israel’s invasion of Gaza is associated with negative returns and heightened volatility across most sectors. Additionally, the finance and technology sectors appear to be the most vulnerable, whereas the industrials and real estate sectors show comparatively lower levels of impact.

Given the observed negative effects of public attention to geopolitical conflicts on stock price dynamics, investors should consider incorporating geopolitical risk assessments into their investment strategies. Understanding how the Israel–Palestine conflict affects market behavior can help investors and fund managers make more informed decisions, including diversifying their asset portfolios to reduce risk or adjusting their positions in sectors most susceptible to such events.

To our best knowledge, this paper presents the first attempt to leverage the ongoing Israel–Palestine war as a compelling example to assess how public awareness of, and reactions to, interstate conflicts impinge on financial market returns and volatility.

This study focuses on Egypt’s recent experience with exchange rate policies, examining the existence of spillover effects of exchange rate variations on stock prices across two different de facto regimes and whether these effects, if any, are asymmetric.

The empirical analysis is carried out using a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag modeling framework, which permits testing for the presence of short- and long-run asymmetries. Relevant local and global factors are also included in the analysis as control variables. The authors divide the entire sample into a soft peg period and a free float one.

Over the soft peg regime period, both positive and negative changes in EGP/USD exchange rates seem to have a significant impact on stock returns, whether in the short or long run. Short-term asymmetric effects vanish in the free float period, while long-term asymmetries continue to exist. By and large, the authors find that currency depreciation tends to exercise a stronger influence on stock returns than does currency appreciation.

The results offer important insights for investors, regulators and policymakers. With the domestic currency depreciation having a negative impact on stock prices, investors should contemplate implementing appropriate currency hedging strategies to abate depreciation risks and, hence, preserve their expected rate of return on the Egyptian pound-denominated investments. In the current post-flotation era, the government could pursue a flexible inflation targeting monetary policy framework, with a view to both lowering the soaring inflation toward an announced target rate and stabilizing economic growth. The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) could adopt indirect monetary policy instruments to secure tightened liquidity conditions. Besides, the CBE could raise policy rates to incentivize people to keep their money in local currency-denominated instruments, instead of dollarizing their savings, thereby relieving banks of foreign currency demand pressures. Nevertheless, while being beneficial to the country’s real economy on several aspects, such contractionary monetary measures may temporarily impinge on stock market performance. Accordingly, policymakers should consider precautionary measures that reduce the potential for price distortions and unnecessary volatility in the stock market.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study represents the first attempt to explore the potential impact of exchange rate changes under different regimes on Egypt’s stock market, thus contributing to the relevant research in this area.

This study aims to revisit the stock price–volume relations, providing new evidence from the emerging market of Qatar. In particular, three main issues are examined using both aggregate market- and sector-level data. First, the return–volume relation and whether or not this relation is asymmetric. Second, the common characteristics of return volatility; and third, the nature of the relation between trading volume and return volatility.

The study uses the OLS and VAR modeling approaches to examine the contemporaneous and dynamic (causal) relations between index returns and trading volume, respectively, while an EGARCH-X(1,1) model is used to analyze the volatility–volume relation. The data set comprises daily index observations and the corresponding trading volumes for the entire market and the individual seven sectors of the Qatar Exchange (i.e. banks and financial services, consumer goods and services, industrials, insurance, real estate, telecommunications and transportation).

The empirical analysis reports evidence of a positive contemporaneous return–volume relation in all sectors barring transportation and insurance. This relation appears to be asymmetric for all sectors. For the market and almost all sectors, there is no significant causality between returns and volume. By and large, these findings lend support for the implications of the mixture of distributions hypothesis (MDH). Lastly, the information content of lagged volume seems to have an important role in predicting the future dynamics of return volatility in all sectors, with the industrials being the exception.

The findings provide important implications for portfolio managers and investors, given that the volume of transactions is generally found to be informative about the price movement of sector indices. Specifically, tracking the behavior of trading volume over time can give a broad portrayal of the future direction of market prices and volatility of equity, thereby enriching the information set available to investors for decision-making.

Based on both market- and sector-level data from the emerging stock market of Qatar, this study attempts to fill an important void in the literature by examining the return–volume and volatility–volume linkages.

Over a short interval of time (i.e. 2011-2014), Egypt has experienced tectonic political shifts, including the toppling of a long-entrenched dictator, two presidential elections, and a military coup. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the impact of such events on the country’s equity market behaviour, both in terms of returns and volatility.

The data set is composed of daily stock index closing prices for the overall market and top eight most actively traded sectors. To assess the impact of the considered events on the market and sector returns, an event study approach is applied. On the other hand, a univariate VAR-EGARCH model is employed to explore whether, and to what extent, volatilities at the market and sector levels respond to such events.

The results suggest that political uncertainty has a profound impact on the risk-return profiles of almost all market sectors, with different degrees of intensity. By and large, the price and volatility effects are most pronounced in banks, financial services excluding banks and chemicals sectors, whilst food and beverages as well as construction and materials sectors are found to be the least responsive to these events. The 2013 military coup turns out to be the most pervasive event impinging on the market and sector-specific indices.

The results have a number of practical implications that could be of interest to many parties involved. More specifically, with political dysfunction overshadowing business and investment activities in Egypt, genuine democratic reforms, which entail proper regard for human rights and the rule of law, must have the highest priority of policymakers, in order to secure a positive investment climate and to foster investor confidence. Furthermore, in tandem with considering other relevant factors, multinational companies need to have a thorough assessment of Egypt’s future political course and to develop more robust contingency plans to effectively combat potential threats generated by political vicissitudes.

To the author’s best knowledge, this study is the first attempt to empirically examine the price and volatility effects of the recent presidential events in Egypt, thereby contributing to the relevant literature in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interrelationships amongst the sector‐specific indices of the Qatar Exchange (QE) (i.e. Banking and Financial Institutions (BFI), Industrial (IND), Insurance (INS), and Services (SER)). More specifically, three key issues are explored in this study. First, the long‐run relationships amongst the sectors. Second, the short‐run causal relationships amongst them; and third, the relative degree of endogeneity/exogeneity of each sector.

To address the issues of interest, the author employs the econometric analyses of Johansen's multivariate cointegration, Granger's causality, and generalized forecast error variance decomposition. This battery of techniques gives the opportunity to examine the nature of both long‐ and short‐run intersectoral relationships in the QE. To augment the robustness of the empirical analysis, daily as well as weekly closing stock price indices for the four sectors of the Qatar Exchange are used, spanning the period from January 2, 2008 up to April 7, 2011.

Based on daily and weekly data, the results of Johansen's multivariate cointegration analysis suggest that the four sector indices of the QE share a long‐term equilibrium relationship. The Granger's causality analysis based on daily and weekly datasets provides clear evidence that the BFI sector seems to be a significant causal factor in regard to the price predictability of the remaining sectors in the short run, and that the SER sector surprisingly seems to have the least influential role. Finally, the results of the generalized forecast error variance decomposition analysis using daily data show that the IND and BFI appear to be the most exogenous sectors, whereas the SER and INS are the most endogenous ones. The results based on weekly data confirm the relative exogeneity of the BFI sector and the relative endogeneity of the SER sector.

The findings of this study hold practical implications for individual and institutional investors alike. The potential gains derived from cross‐sector diversification could be rather limited, given the significant degree of interrelationships found amongst the sector indices of the QE. Moreover, the composition of domestic portfolios based on sector‐level investments should be revisited, particularly after major events. The findings also bring some important insights for policymakers. Given the influential role played by the BFI sector in the Qatari economy, policymakers should design appropriate strategies that curb the spread of unanticipated shocks originating from this sector to its counterparts. Besides, due to the considerable degree of endogeneity of the SER sector, it is essential for policymakers to set up precautionary regulations, with the aim of minimizing its vulnerability to common shocks in turbulent times.

Building upon the extant research and focusing on a relatively unexplored market, the paper represents a pioneer attempt to provide empirical evidence on the interdependence structure amongst the sector‐specific indices of the Qatar Exchange.

Extending the extant literature and using Qatar’s equity market as a case study, this paper aims to look into the potential impacts of foreign investor groups’ trading activities on market volatility in comparison with those of Qatar’s domestic investor counterparts.

The dataset is comprised of daily aggregated values of stock purchases and sales made separately by four investor groups, namely, foreign individual investors, foreign institutional investors, domestic individual investors, and domestic institutional investors. An ex post measure of volatility introduced by Rogers and Satchell (1991) is employed. Four proxies for investor trading are considered separately in the analysis. The objective of the study is empirically addressed in the context of the Generalized Method of Moments estimation technique.

In general, there exists substantial contemporaneous price impact associated with foreign equity investment in the Qatari capital market, despite the fact that foreigners’ buy and sell trades are not as large as those of their domestic counterparts. More specifically, foreign institutional sales (purchases) tend to increase (reduce) market volatility. Like those of foreign institutions, the sell trades by foreign individuals have a positive impact on volatility. On the other hand, domestic institutional purchases are significantly negatively related with market volatility, whereas the sell trades by the same category have no impact on volatility. Finally, surprises in foreigners’ trading volumes turn out to be responsible for adding to volatility.

Although a sudden reversal of foreign capital flows can pose a real threat to the stability of the Qatari capital market, such capital flows are deemed to be an indispensable vehicle for enhancing the liquidity and efficiency of the market. Accordingly, policy makers in Qatar should overhaul the current foreign investment legislation to make it even more streamlined and better suited to achieving the country’s strategic vision for the market. Foremost in these reforms is relaxing the stringent 25 percent foreign ownership restriction. Such a relaxation process is highly recommended to be phased in only gradually, in order to weigh its pros and cons. In this regard, the authorities concerned should consider embarking on a range of procedures intended to ward off the adverse ramifications of foreign capital outflows.

To the author’s best knowledge, no study about the impact of foreign equity flows on domestic markets has been so far conducted using trading data from the Qatari market. This work presents one such attempt.

The main thrust of the present study is to look into the trading patterns of behavior and investment performance exhibited by individual and institutional investor categories in the Qatar Exchange (QE). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The present study uses daily aggregated investment flows made separately by each investor group, as well as daily closing price observations of the QE stock composite index. The trading patterns of investor categories are examined by estimating a bivariate vector autoregressive process of order p, VAR (p). To determine whether each category performs well or poorly over the entire sample period, each investor category's cumulative returns are estimated and analyzed.

The empirical results reveal that institutional investors pursue positive feedback trading strategies, whereas individual investors tend to be negative feedback traders. Both investor categories appear to be engaged in herding behavior. Additionally, institutional investors perform well over almost the entire sample period. In contrast, individual investors' negative market timing ability dominates their overall poor performance.

The investment performance gap found between institutional investors and individual investors in the Qatari capital market may reflect a large information asymmetry in favour of the former category. Indeed, the poor performance of individual investors implies that their trading activities are generally driven by factors and considerations that are irrelevant to fundamentals. Moreover, their irrational trading decisions may play some role in the formation of asset price bubbles.

The present study makes the first attempt to provide empirical evidence on the investment patterns and performance of individual and institutional investors trading on the Qatari capital market.

This paper aims to propose a conceptual framework for the assessment of Islamic financial products’ development.

A coordinate grid with two perpendicular axes (profitability and compliance to Shari’ah) is developed and used to produce a nine-zone matrix. The research design is further developed by using a linear, composite index to assess product development feasibility and specifications. Subsequently, three strategic paths are identified: profitability-led strategic path, compliance-led strategic path and intermediate strategic path.

The findings indicate that the ideal strategic behavior the Islamic financial institutions have to borrow corresponds to the intermediate strategic path because it optimizes the trade-off between the two attributes under consideration. A proper development strategy of Islamic financial products should not ignore the compliance to the substance of Shari’ah and combine it simultaneously with profitability.

The paper’s originality consists in the identification of the portfolio of Islamic financial products’ strategic positioning in the nine-zone matrix and the determination of the most suitable product development strategy.

This study aims to investigate the impact of perceived subtle and overt discrimination on employees’ emotional exhaustion, along with potential mitigating factors such as social support, organizational inclusion and religiosity.

The research is based on a sample of 359 Muslim employees working in US restaurants. The data are analyzed using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Techniques.

The results reveal that high/low emotional exhaustion in tourism and hospitality sector is triggered by multiple combinations of high/low levels of subtle and overt discrimination, family and friends support and religiosity. Such findings hold important implications to both theory and practice.

By using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, this research stands out from studies on discrimination that use conventional statistical methods. It proposes several solutions leading to a single outcome (high/low emotional exhaustion). This new approach contributes to the advancement of theory in this context.

This study shows that there is no single best solution for high/low emotional exhaustion. Stated differently, multiple solutions provide several ways for firms to mitigate employees’ emotional exhaustion.

Religious discrimination in workplaces is increasing at an alarming rate, particularly in customer facing roles, such as the tourism and hospitality industry. This is having detrimental effects on employees from minority groups, often leading to excessive levels of emotional exhaustion. Nonetheless, the extant literature has somewhat understated the consequences of this issue, creating a void that needs to be fulfilled. This study addresses this gap.