1. Scholarly Works

The last decade has witnessed a rapid expansion of Islamic financial instruments with a notable proliferation of Islamic investment certificates called sukuk. In spite of the expansion, research to appraise their growth implications remains limited. This paper investigated the structural differences within sukuk and conventional and their implications on investor return reactions. It also looked at the investors' different decision making time horizon dimensions in response to the respective debt security's announcement. Our sample consisted of 158 conventional bonds and 129 sukuk issuers between 2000 and 2013. Event-study methodology and wavelet analysis were used resulting in three major findings. Firstly, market investors perceived sukuk and conventional bonds as different financial instruments. Variations in investor reactions persisted when each sub-category of sukuk and conventional bond were examined separately. Lastly, firm value and shareholder wealth were affected in different ways upon the issuance announcement of of a specific sukuk or conventional bond. Specifically, the equity-like features within convertible bonds and partnership-based sukuk negated institutional investors' wealth, but were due to different 'dilution' arguments. Sukuk created unique wealth effects for corporate issuers, day traders and institutional investors in comparison with conventional bonds.

This paper investigates the effects of religious screening on payout behavior of US firms. Shariah compliant (SC) indices serve as suitable sample as they are emerging as alternative investment class in the last two decades. Through an analysis of a sample of US firms belonging to Dow Jones proprietary database for the period 2006-2018, this study provides evidence that SC firms are more prone to make total payout, cash dividends and repurchases. We use panel logistic regressions with industry and year fixed effects. The findings reveal that the drivers of higher propensity of total payout are higher profitability, higher retained earnings, lower debt capital structure and lower asset growth. The factors that contribute to likelihood of paying higher cash dividends are higher profitability, lower governance levels and lower market/book assets ratio. Moreover, better governance, lower asset growth and lower equity/assets increase the propensity of SC firms to make higher repurchases. These findings are important contribution to the Islamic corporate finance and dividend policy literature.

Capital structure serves as an important device for mitigation of agency conflicts and, although firms combine debt and cash dividends to address the agency conflicts, debt is preferred as a bonding device by many managers due to its lower cost as compared to equity (John, Knyazeva & Knyazeva, 2015). However, shariah-compliant firms (SCF) cannot use this device due to prohibition of interest-bearing loans in Islam. In this scenario, the dividend payout policy becomes a highly important tool of corporate governance for shariah-compliant investors. Moreover, the managers of these firms cannot maintain stable dividends by issuing bonds and, therefore, the dividend policy of such firms would be different. This chapter highlights the dividend payout behaviour of SCF by comparing them to conventional firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of risk shifting behavior in bonds and sukuk. The examination is significant, as economists and scholars identify risk shifting as the primary cause of the global financial crisis. Yet, the dangers of this debt-financing feature are largely ignored - one needs to only witness the record growth of global debt even after the global financial crisis. To identify the signs of risk shifting existence in the corporations, this paper compares each corporation's operating risk before and after issuing debt. Operating risk or risk of a firm's activities is measured using the volatility of the operating earnings or coefficient variation of earning before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). Using EBITDA as the variable offers one distinct advantage to using asset volatility as previous research has - EBITDA can be extracted directly from firms' accounting data and is not model-specific.

This paper examines the financial performance of ethical funds in different regions and concludes that there is a cost attached to ethical investing. An analysis of 964 mutual funds comprising of Socially responsible funds (SRFs) and the Shariah-compliant equity funds (SCFs) suggests that: a) except for global funds, both types of funds underperform in the market, b) both types of funds are preferred for investment in growth and momentum stocks, c) SRFs are preferred for small capitalized stocks whereas SCFs do not follow any specific style or investment strategy, d) unlike SRFs, SCFs do not provide a safe haven for investors during crises. These findings are probably due to the lack of diversification opportunities and poor managerial skills. The results are robust to various asset pricing models and macroeconomic factors.

Investment is an activity that involves the commitment of resources for a certain holding period in anticipation of creating more resource (wealth). This chapter focuses on the risk-adjusted performance of two-specific classes of assets, namely, the socially responsible investment (SRI) class and the shariah-compliant classes of assets. The aim is to ascertain whether investors have to bear an extra cost for choosing these classes of assets in their portfolio. In managing the Islamic finance space, religiosity and/or ethical practices prompt investors to discard so-called 'sin-stocks' and limit their investment horizons to permissible faith-based investment alternatives ...

The global Islamic finance industry has evolved from a small industry to a dynamic, robust, and competitive one. Currently, the industry, built on the notion of justice and fairness, has a global asset size of approximately USD2 trillion (MIFC, 2016). Despite the soft global economic outlook, this industry is expected to grow as many more nations are embracing this alternative system that is proven to be not only profitable but also resilient to macroeconomic shocks.

The goal of this paper is to address the relationship between crude oil-price changes on some selected African Islamic indices, using daily data from May 4, 2011, to January 25, 2018. We employed three main techniques: MODWT, CWT, and multivariate-GARCH-DCC, to analyze whether these markets have any diversification opportunities. Our findings reveal that, first, the results of MODWT shows Egyptian Islamic index leading all indices. Second, CWT results show that investors would gain diversification benefits in almost all markets (except South Africa) and enjoy the benefit that comes with long-term investments. Third, we observed low correlations between the Egyptian and Tunisian Islamic indices, with oil-price returns suggesting diversification benefits in these markets. Of all the Islamic stock markets, Tunisia's has the lowest volatility with the crude oil index. Investors holding a portfolio of these stocks can afford to have exposure in crude oil-related assets and achieve maximum diversification benefits

This paper examines the flow-performance relationship and the presence of "Smart money effect" in Socially responsible funds (SRFs) and Shariah compliant funds (SCFs). A survivorship bias free sample of 686 funds comprising of 212 SCFs and 474 SRFs were analysed with investment focus in the Asia pacific, Emerging markets, Europe, Global (with no focus to any specific country or region), Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and North America. The findings show that flow-performance relationship is asymmetric for both the funds as the response to positive returns is more as compare to the negative returns for the last/current year as well as the last/current month. There is also a significant presence of "Smart money effect" in both the funds for the entire sample but there is no evidence of "Smart money effect" in SRFs for the sample of old funds.

There is no uniform methodology adopted worldwide for Shariah equity screening. The purpose of this research paper is to suggest reforms required to improve Shariah screening methodologies used for equities using Dow Jones Islamic Market Index, which is the world’s first such methodology adopted. This research uses a qualitative research methodology that goes beyond analysing secondary data on the subject matter. It includes conducting semi-structured interviews with selected subject matter experts to gain insights into the practical issues associated with existing Shariah screening methodologies. The aim is to identify areas for potential reforms that can be implemented in the future. By combining secondary data analysis with first-hand perspectives from experts, this research provides a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities in Shariah screening, contributing to the development of practical and effective reforms. The study recommends the inclusion of additional filters in Shariah screening methodologies to promote stocks that are not only Shariah-compliant but also socially responsible. It suggests that while a certain level of Shariah non-compliance threshold may be tolerated during the initial screening stage, over time, this accepted threshold should gradually decrease. The ultimate goal is to achieve 0% thresholds for Shariah-compliant equities. By advocating for stricter criteria and a progressive reduction in non-compliance tolerance, the study highlights the importance of continuously improving and refining Shariah screening practices to ensure higher levels of compliance and alignment with Shariah principles.

This study examines the effect of 1096 analyst recommendation revisions on prices of Shariah compliant and Shariah non-compliant listed securities in Bursa Malaysia over the period 2005-2016. The study finds that while stocks added-to-buy had positive abnormal returns, the stocks added-to-sell and remove-from-buy had negative abnormal returns in short- and long-term horizons. This finding shows that analysts' recommendation revisions carry valuable information. Secondly, the study examined the effect of analysts' recommendation revisions issued contemporaneously with earnings announcements and without earnings announcements on price reactions over various time horizons. The results show that earnings announcements can trigger analysts' recommendation revisions because the investors react strongly to analysts' recommendation revisions issued contemporaneously with earnings announcements. We find that performance differences of Shariah-compliant and Shariah non-compliant stocks in response to analysts' recommendation revisions are often negligible. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence that analysts' recommendation revisions for Shariah-compliant companies often do not own any additional investment value than those for Shariah non-compliant stocks.

Similar to any type of financial asset, sukuk are vulnerable to macroeconomic conditions and business cycles. In 1999, there were a series of high-profile sukuk defaults globally that tarnised the market's confidence in sukuk. Among these were the East Cameron Partners (ECP), in which the company failed to pay the periodic returns that amounted to US$166 million (Zaheer and Wijnbergen, 2013). Nakheel Sukuk of Dubai are issued by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Malaysian companies that include Johor Corporation, Ingress Sukuk Berhad, Tracoma Holdings Berhad and Nam Fatt Corporation Berhad.

This paper aims at investigating the time varying relationship between Islamic equity and commodity returns in order to examine how combination of Islamic equities and commodities contribute to the benefits of portfolio investors and managers. In order to investigate this relationship, we employed multivariate GARCH method on return series of five different commodity groups (energy, precious metals, agricultural, non-ferrous metals and softs group), Dow Jones spot commodity index as a proxy of an aggregate commodity market and Dow Jones Islamic index over the period January 3, 2001 - March 28, 2013. Our findings show that correlations between commodity and Islamic stock markets’ returns change in different time periods and these two markets moved very closely during 2008 financial crisis in particular. Besides, volatility of returns in both markets reached at their peaks during the 2008 crisis period. We also show that despite sharing some common features, commodities cannot be considered as a homogeneous asset class: a speculation phenomenon is for instance, highlighted for energy sector comprising oil, while the safe-haven role of gold is evidenced, which constitutes a part of precious metal sector.

Although sukuk has been dominating the Malaysian capital market, the motivations of the firms issuing sukuk or conventional bonds remained largely unexplored. Using the partial adjustment model, we make the initial attempt, to test a firm's target debt optimizing behavior and secondly, to find the firm specific determinants of target debt ratio using a sukuk or conventional bond issuance 3 dataset. Our sample consists of 120 conventional bonds and 80 sukuk issuers from 2000 to 2012. We employ two recent dynamic panel data estimators, 4 which resulted in three major findings. Firstly, our results provide stronger support for trade-off view based on a firm's optimizing behavior among sukuk and conventional bond issuers, however with different issuance motives. Secondly, issuers of partnership-based sukuk and convertible bonds closely follow the pecking order view, in which the former is chosen based on firms facing a higher information asymmetry cost. Finally, while both exchange-based sukuk and straight bond issuers align towards a particular target, only firms with higher sales growth prefer the former. Reinforced by industry insights, our findings evidence that the sukuk offers bring unique “benefits” to corporate issuers unlike those of the conventional bonds.