The article evaluates dynamic interactions between Islamic financing and macroeconomic and financial variables for Malaysia using the Toda-Yamamoto (1995) causality test and innovation accounting approach. The results suggest strong causal influences of interest rate on Islamic financing but insignificant causal relations from real stock prices or real production to Islamic financing. Thus, while the results suggest that Islamic financing in Malaysia is resilient to boom/bust cycles of the stock market or fluctuations in real activity, Islamic banks under a dual-banking environment are not spared from fluctuations in interest rate or monetary conditions of the country.

The paper assesses empirically the inflation-hedging properties of gold and, as comparison, of the stock market for Malaysia using montly data from July 2001 to May 2007. The results provide clear evidence that, over the sample period, gold serves as a good inflationary hedge. However, the hedging value seems to be lacking in stock prices. More specifically, from regression analyses, we note that gold provides a good hedge over all investment horizons considered and with better hedging at longer horizons. Moreover, from the VAR-based impulse response functions, the return on gold investment seems to increase immediately in response to inflation shocks. For the stock return, we find no evidence of its significant relation or significant response to inflation regardless of the horizons used to compute stock return and inflation.

In this paper, we perform a non-linear assessment of Islamic rate - conventional rate relations for the case of Malaysia. Using monthly data covering the period January 1999 to November 2016, we find strong evidence supporting non-linear reactions of the Islamic investment rates to conventional rates in the long run and/or short-run for all matched maturities. More precisely, the Islamic investment rates exhibit faster upward movement (slower downward movement) in responses to conventional deposit rate increases (decreases). The asymmetric pricing behaviour of Islamic banks however tends to weaken as maturity lengthens. Accordingly, we infer that Islamic banks do not rigidly peg their investment deposit rates to conventional deposit rates as some have claimed in questioning the Islamicity of Islamic banks.

This paper assesses the impact of changing competition landscape and Islamic bank penetration on bank risk, profitability and capitalization. This study utilizes an unbalanced panel dataset consisting of 37 commercial banks over the period 1997 to 2015. The paper uses a panel VAR methodology to discern the interactions between bank competition and Islamic banking presence on one hand and bank performance on the other hand. We find evidence supportive of both competition - stability and competition - fragility views for conventional banks. The results suggest that bank competition improves conventional bank risk and, at the same time, lower profitability and capital holdings. As for Islamic banks, competition seems to robustly influence only bank profitability. Finally, we note that increasing Islamic bank penetration improves the risk profile of conventional banks and, as expected, reduces their market power. These results bear important implications on the design of competition policies in a dual banking system as well as on the development of the Islamic banking sector.