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.

After the global financial crisis, liquidity management has been a great concern to both Islamic and conventional banks, as liquidity management is linked to the bank's profitability and overall sustainability of financial system. While shortage of liquidity has taken centre-stage in Basel 3 reforms as a consequence of the US subprime loan crises, the problem of excess liquidity in Islamic banking remains unresolved in view of the lack of product offerings like medium term sukuk that should give relatively higher yields than short-term Islamic securities. Evidently, few literatures have examined the problem of excess liquidity in Islamic banks and no empirical evidence on the factors leading to the excess liquidity has been found. To shed light on that gap, this paper endeavours to find the catalysts of excess liquidity in Islamic banks using fixed effect and random effect model. The sample is taken form Malaysia considering homogeneous sample. Interestingly enough, both Islamic banks as well as conventional banks have been found to hold excess liquid assets. The availability and issuance of short-term Islamic securities and long-term sukuk, which was focused variable in this study has been found significantly affecting the excess liquidity in Islamic finance. Hence, based on this findings, the availability of short-term Islamic securities and long term sukuk have saved Islamic banks from inefficiency arising from low asset utilization and hence lower profitability. To increase efficient use of assets, it is recommended that Islamic financial institutions and Shariah compliant companies be more diligent in offering medium term sukuks.

This paper studies the effect of political stability on economic growth by taking 120 developing countries over the period of 1996-2014. We apply relatively advanced dynamic two step system-GMM and quantile regression. Political stability is found to be a key determinant of economic growth. More importantly, political instability (or risk) is found to be higher in the OIC countries and is a deterrent to economic growth. Also, for the lower and middle income OIC countries, political instability appears to affect economic growth more severely perhaps due to the absence of strong economic and political institutions. Moreover, political instability is also found to be significantly higher in the oil-dependent OIC countries. Notably, political instability is likely to affect growththrough the channels of investment and human capital accumulation in the developing countries. Finally, the impact of political stability and political instability on growth is found to be equally distributed across the OIC countries with higher or lower growth level. Therefore, the development of political and economic institutions along with human capital development is recommended for all the developing countries in general and the OIC countries in particular.