This study assesses the role of gold, crude oil and cryptocurrency as a safe haven for traditional, sustainable, and Islamic investors during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Using Wavelet coherence analysis and spillover index methodologies in bivariate and multivariate settings, this study examines the correlation of these assets for different investment horizons. The findings suggest that gold, oil and bitcoin exhibited low coherency with each stock index across almost all considered investment horizons until the onset of the COVID-19. Conversely, with the outbreak of the pandemic, the return spillover is more intense across financial assets, and a significant pairwise return connectedness between each equity index and hedging asset is observed. Hence, gold, oil, and bitcoin do not exhibit safe-haven characteristics. However, by decomposing the time-varying co-movements into different investment horizons, we find that total and pairwise connectedness among the assets are primarily driven by a higher-frequency band (up to 4 days). It indicates that investors have diversification opportunities with gold, oil, and bitcoin at longer horizons. The results are robust over different types of equity investors (traditional, sustainable, and Islamic) and various investment horizons.

There is a strong theoretical foundation that demonstrates costs of switching as one of the main barriers in creating a healthy level of competition. Switching costs might even be more prevalent for Islamic banks due to Shariah dimension since Shariah driven customers are limited to only switch to banks that offer Shariah-compliant products. However, the banking market is not completely segmented as Islamic banking clients can switch to conventional banks, and vice versa. This paper examines the degree of switching costs in Islamic and conventional banks, and investigates its influence on bank competition in dual banking economies. We find that conventional banks inherit higher switching costs than Islamic banks. The finding is consistent for all countries in the sample except for Malaysia and Bahrain. We also find that switching costs during the global financial crisis are higher than the rest of the years. We further document a significant negative relationship between switching costs and bank competition, while this relationship is more pronounced for Islamic banks.