1. Scholarly Works

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused unprecedented upheavals to the global economy at a scale never seen before in the history of humankind. While governments around the world grappled for the right panacea to address the socio-economic disruptions faced by their nations, the pandemic uncovered new outlook and opportunities. This inevitably compelled the global economies to revisit and reshape their thinking, re-prioritize, re-plan and start implementing initiatives that are more sustainable, resilient, and social in nature. In this regard, banking system plays a vital role in strengthening and sustaining the economy of a country. In doing so, it must ensure that it facilities and supports the recovery measures as announced by its respective government for the survival of the nation particularly the bottom sector of the society during this challenging time.

The rapid growth of Islamic finance, especially Islamic banking, and its perceived resiliency during the global financial crisis have been key features in recent Islamic finance literature. The Islamic banking business model has also started to attract empirical attention from economists as to whether it can instil the much needed stability into the financial system. While some studies have offered evidence that Islamic banks are relatively more stable and resilient than their conventional counterparts (Cihak and Hesse, 2010; Hasan and Dridi, 2010), there still remain several concerns over whether Islamic banks can play a distinct role in the stability of the financial system and can better allocate financial resources ...

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.

The purpose of this paper is to use Ferrell and Gresham (1985) contingency model to examine the impact of situational factors on decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues of Islamic banking practitioners. A total of 262 samples are collected from Islamic banking practitioners in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and data analysis is conducted using structural equation modelling (SEM) with a confirmatory approach. The empirical findings indicate that decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues of Islamic banking practitioners is significantly influenced in the process of interacting with persons who are part of the organisation, and these influences are determined by the intra-organisational distance and legitimate authority between the individuals and the focal person. Further, it is also empirically verified that decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues of Islamic banking practitioners is significantly influenced by the presence and/or absence of the opportunity factors such as corporate policies, professional codes of ethics and rewards/punishment system that prevails in the organisation.

Even though large banks could imply large risks and heightened vulnerability for a country's macroeconomy, the presence of many small banks with similar behavior such as Islamic banks could also cause systemic risks. This article makes an initial attempt to investigate the impact of bank size on banking performance. Our study spans 12 emerging countries with dual banking systems and applies two-step dynamic system GMM estimator. The results show that size really does matter in the banking industry, and its impact on performance tends to be non-linear with a trade-off between profitability and efficiency. Comparing conventional with Islamic banks, we find that bank size has almost the same impact on the performance of both types of banks.