Fekri Ali Shawtari; Buerhan Saiti; Shaikh Hamzah Shaikh Abdul Razak; Mohamed Ariff Abdul Kareem (INCEIF, 2016)
The issues of earning management has received attention from practitioners and academicians since the last couple of decades in banking sector. It is evident that bank managers practice the discretion in estimating loan/finance loss provisions for various motives such as reducing earnings variability (Agarwal, Chomsisengphet, Liu & Rhee, 2007; Kanagaretnam, 2004). Majority of the studies have been focusing on conventional banks, and only a few studies have focussed on Islamic banks, for instance, Zoubi and Al-Khazali (2007) and Othman and Mersni (2014). The significance of examining the issues in the context of Islamic banks stems from the fact that Islamic banks should not manage their earnings the way their conventional banks do. This is because the underlying theoretical basis of Islamic banks are based on Shariah principles which is different from conventional banks.
Recently there has been heightened concern over "contagion" in the conventional financial markets. This study is motivated by the desire to test empirically whether the contagion seen in conventional stock indexes are also present amongst Shari'ah-compliant stock indexes. A key issue in testing for both Islamic and conventional financial market contagion is to draw a distinction between "excessive" and normal co-movements across financial markets. A distinction between contagion and interdependence during periods of high volatility in financial markets has important implications for the asset allocation strategy of risk managers and for policymakers' optimal policy response to a crisis.
