Journal Article

The recent surge in demand for Shariah compliant instruments alongside the launch of Dow Jones City group Sukuk Index in 2006 has further catalyzed the increase in the number of issuance of global Islamic Sukuk. Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar have become major issuers of global Sukuk which are highly demanded by investors. The normal rationale given behind such behavior might be the religious commitments to involve in riba free investments. However, it is worth testing that is it only religious commitments that are driving the demand or there may be some other factors contributing to this surge. Realizing that the majority of global Sukuk issuance is from the oil exporter countries, one such factor could be the price of crude oil. The relationship between crude oil prices and global Sukuk Index is not much covered in the literature as the facility has just started gaining attention in global capital markets. Insufficient data and the lack of reliable benchmarks for global Islamic Sukuk performances add further to the difficulties. While being impaired by such limits, this study will attempt to find out the possibility of any impact of oil prices on the global Sukuk returns and hence their issuance. The aims are achieved using advanced wavelet techniques. Our results, based on discrete wavelet, showed that there turned out to be noticeable correlation between the heave in global Sukuk issuance and the crude oil prices on more times than not.

This study embodies a preliminary endeavour at analysing the impact of leverage on portfolio behaviour, with specific reference to return and volatility, in the European stock markets, using the debt ratio as one of the important benchmarks for Islamic stock screening. Given the focus of Islamic stock screening on the debt ratio, we use data from 320 firms for eight European countries which were classified according to their level of debt and size. For this, the portfolio optimisation based Mean-Variance Efficient Frontier (MVEF), the Sharpe Ratio and the Capital Market Line (CML) were employed. Our findings tend to demonstrate that, under shocks, high leverage worsens the portfolio return, volatility, and value at risk. The results further point out that optimal portfolio composition is obtained through a high proportion of low debt funds in the case of two separate equity funds, of low debt and high debt portfolios respectively. The systematic risk of several portfolio strategies is further explored with regards to a benchmark of European index and market-wide, return and volatility shocks.

The impact of leverage on financial market stability and the relationship with the real economy is a key concern among researchers. This paper makes an initial attempt to investigate the relationship between a firm's leverage, return and share price volatility from an Islamic finance perspective and capital structure theory. A multicountry dynamic panel framework and the mean-variance efficient frontier are applied to 320 sample firms from eight European countries, divided into portfolios of low and high debt using the shari'ah screening threshold of 33%. We find that the firm's return and volatility change with changes in the capital structure. Islamic compliant stocks show, in most cases, less volatility than non-compliant stocks but are no different in terms of return. Finally, our results tend to imply a case for limiting debt beyond certain levels.

Using wavelet techniques (discrete and continuous), this paper is the first attempt to investigate the co-movement dynamics at different time scales or horizons of Islamic Dubai Financial Market (DFM-UAE) index returns with their counterpart regional Islamic indices returns such as GCC index, ASEAN index, Developing Countries index, Emerging Countries Index, and the Global Sukuk. Finally, we examine the impact of the LIBOR on the Islamic DFM-UAE return. Our first finding is that the two markets DFM_UAE, and (GCC and Saudi) are converging, in the long run, to the same level of risk and volatility with the Global Sukuk index. The wavelet analysis based on betas indicates a strong non-homogeneous correlation across scales and for different periods of time. Closer markets tend to suggest a contagion effect showing higher correlation and higher interdependence with a certain time delay. Evidence shows a flight to quality to the less risky Sukuk market mostly during the last financial crisis. The lead–lag analysis tends to indicate that the GCC leads DFM-UAE which leads Sukuk. Finally, this study sheds further light on the important leading impact of the overnight LIBOR on the returns of Islamic stock indices especially during the big changes or under shocks indicating policy implications for portfolio diversification for the international investors. The results are plausible and intuitive and have strong policy implications.

This study investigates the relationship and shock transmission between firm leverage and systematic risk within the Shari'ah stock screening rules among seven European countries with a sample of 689 firms for the period from 2008 Q2 to 2013 Q1. Due to the fact that high leverage augments systematic risk and accentuates the firm's vulnerability to shocks,debt screening is used to examine the sampled portfolios. As it imposes limits on debt,we examined the impact of such an ethical screening and a risk moderating principle on stock volatility, susceptibility to contagion and the implications for portfolio diversification.Using a vector auto regressive dynamic panel of multi-country framework, systematic risk is analysed by taking into account firm characteristics, country effects, and the heterogeneity across firms, thereby ensuring the robustness of results. Our findings suggest that the systematic risk changes with changes in the capital structure; the Shari'ah-compliant stocks are shown in most cases to carry less risk than conventional stock, while they do not necessarily out-perform in terms of return; during the global financial crisis. We conclude that during the global financial crisis, Islamic compliant stocks demonstrated lower values of systematic risk in the case of "Low Debt" portfolios when comparison to "High Debt" portfolios.