The derivatives markets in the Asian region have shown significant growth and development since their inception. Similarly, derivatives market in Malaysia and Bursa Malaysia Derivatives have experienced remarkable changes and developments. This study focuses mainly on the stock index futures contract (FKLI) and its relationship with the underlying spot index (FBM KLCI). The FKLI is chosen instead of other permissible futures due to availability of the data and its relevance in the context of fund managers' asset allocation strategy. The FKLI is chosen instead of other permissible futures due to availability of the data and its relevance in the context of fund managers’ asset allocation strategy. Mainly based on intraday data, this study makes an analysis of issues on pricing efficiency, the expiration-day effects on volume and volatility, the lead lag relationship between stock index and stock index futures, in Malaysian derivatives market as a newly advanced emerging market. Based on the underlying assumption that if a mispricing were to arise, unlimited arbitrage trading would trigger the market price back to its theoretical fair value and hedging effectiveness may go down as a result of pricing inefficiency, the first essay investigates the study of pricing efficiency specifically on the extent of mispricing by contract, evolution of mispricing, and mispricing episodes. Daily data based on the cost-of-carry model and 15-minute intraday data based on the basis model are used to address the issue of pricing efficiency. This essay fills the gap by introducing 15-minute intraday data, in addition to a larger time span of daily data. The results show variations in mispricing over time under study and provide valuable information for policymakers and fund managers as the Malaysia markets become more efficient and seem to provide a better avenue to hedge their positions and protect their investment values.

In the Islamic finance capital market spectrum, the potential of mudharabah and musyarakah sukuk is hampered with criticism by Shariah scholars. Among the criticisms include the presence of uncertainties surrounding sukuk returns, the risk of losses that the rabbul-mal (investors) have to bear, and the need to mitigate agency costs (for mudharabah contracts). This have made it a deterrent for both issuers and investors in seeing the instrument as a viable alternative to debt-based sukuk structures. This study proposes an improvement to musyarakah sukuk. It begins with a qualitative examination of the structure of corporate mudharabah and musyarakah sukuk issued in Malaysia. The examination finds risk-sharing sukuk structures in Malaysia contain features that supresses the risk sharing element between the sukuk investors and issuer. Findings from qualitative analysis is supported by generalized method of moments (GMM) and threshold analysis. Based on the sample of 86 corporate mudharabah and musyarakah sukuk issuances, the introduction of partnership sukuk in the firm's capital structure is found to be insignificant in affecting both firm risk and firm performance. The present partnership sukuk structure is then modified to incorporate variable returns (coupon payments) proportionate to the firm's net profits and variable principal repayment proportionate to the firm's total assets value. This study finds that when sukuk returns are made variable, sukuk investors are able to earn better/ equitable returns compared what they are earning in the current sukuk structure.

The study of currency exposure in the context of small open economies such as the ASEAN-4 region is important in view of the higher degree of openness of the economies and the progressive growth of the Islamic finance industry. This study examined the presence of currency exposure in a sample of 405 listed non-financial corporations from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand over a duration of 18 years from 1993 to 2010. This study is different from previous studies as it combines two assessment methods, i.e., the cash flow (CF) and stock returns (SR) approaches. Furthermore, this study covers two major events of the financial crises ...

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 thesis investigates the determinants and impact of short-term capital flow in the 33 OIC countries from 2000 to 2018 and bridges the understanding between both literature strands. The short-term capital flows are divided into gross inflows, outflows, and extreme episodes, analyzed under the push-pull framework. The empirical approaches for exploring the determinants of short-term capital flows consist of panel static and dynamic LSDV and probit models. Additional analysis controlling for Lucas's paradox conditions provides more insights and robustness. The study then analyzes their impact on economic growth (GDP), conventional, and Islamic stock markets. The study employs time-series models (ARDL and NADRL) to test the impact of short-term capital flows on economic growth and stock markets. The models establish the long-term dynamic relationship and synergize with prior findings on the heterogeneous responses of each country. The findings suggest that short-term capital flows into the OIC countries are tied to the global commodity and domestic consumption effects, indicating the dominance effect from push factors and the global economic cycle. Regional contagion act as a transmission mechanism of episodic flows across the OIC. There is also clear evidence of each country's heterogeneous determinants and impact of short-term capital flows, emphasizing the important roles of pull factors and the level of capital account openness. The impact of STC flows on stock markets confirms that they are susceptible to global economies and uncertainty, especially in conventional stock markets. The findings for Islamic stock markets support the "decoupling hypothesis" since they are less affected by global shocks from higher risks and uncertainty. The overall findings imply the importance of capital liberalization, institutional quality, and the optimal sequence of capital liberalization.

Sukuk is dominating the Malaysian capital market with strong support from the government, mega-conglomerates and firms. As an important source of firms' financing, sukuk is increasingly catching up with existing conventional debt in terms of transaction volume and the number of deals. In spite of the rising interest among issuers in sukuk offers, research to appraise firm's issuance motives and the subsequent effects on shareholders' wealth upon sukuk and conventional bond announcement remains limited. Hence, through this initial study, firstly, we examine the association of firm specific characteristics with the respective debt security principles offers. Secondly, we also investigate the impact of each debt security offer announcement on issuer overall shareholders’ wealth effects. To address the first issue, we employed the dynamic GMM (both difference and system) analyses for testing the “partial adjustment model” with a view to investigating whether firms maintain an optimal target debt ratio when issuing each debt security principles, consistent with the trade-off theory key predictions. We also used the same model to examine the firm’s specific determinants of target debt ratio in an integrated approach. To address the second issue, we adopt both, “event-study” methodology and “wavelet” analysis. The aim is to examine the true dynamics of relationship between the debt security announcement and the shareholders’ wealth effects, given multi-horizon nature of investors.

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.

This study examines the impact of ethical and Shariah screening on idiosyncratic risk, performance and dividend policy decisions for US market for the period 2006-2015. A unique dataset is utilized to construct representative portfolios of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), Shariah compliant investment and Market (proxy). The existing literature suggests that constraints on stock selection imposed by screening may limit investment universe and make faith based portfolios sub-optimal. Therefore, the investors who want to follow their religious or social beliefs need to incur cost of their values. Our results reveal that Shariah compliant investors are slightly disadvantaged in terms of idiosyncratic risk. However, they pay the price of holding religious beliefs by accepting lower risk-return trade off while SRI investors bear no such cost. Moreover, that there is not much variation in dividend policy of the faith based portfolios as compared to market proxy portfolio and good corporate governance promotes dividend payment for the sample portfolios. Furthermore, the firms with low idiosyncratic risk, low financial constraints, high book-to-market-assets ratio, high size and earned equity tend to pay higher dividends. Finally, it had been found that Shariah firms, unlike the market and SRI firms who prefer retaining excess cash, utilize high free cash flows to pay dividends to reduce agency conflicts.

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 dissertation discusses a number of issues in Islamic equity, which can be broadly defined as equity investments that meet certain Shari'ah compliance requirements. A particular stock is deemed as Shari'ah compliant when it "passes" a screening process which encapsulates a number of relevant Islamic principles, rules and tenets. This process, commonly termed Shari'ah stock screening, essentially involves the negative screening or filtering of stocks. While variations may exist from one jurisdiction to another, and between a number of different Islamic index providers ... Available in physical copy only (Call Number: t HG 4551 N336)

This study investigates the roles of Shariah-compliant asset classes as well as Shariah-compliant portfolio strategies, which are divided into three separate essays. The first essay investigates both conventional and Islamic investors' problems as to whether the inclusion of Islamic and conventional asset classes may expand the frontier of their respective portfolios. The sample covers the global U.S. portfolios and Malaysian portfolios with multiple asset classes, as well as the portfolios with a specific asset class in several regions. The study uses the recent mean-variance spanning test in multiple regimes, which not only accounts for tail risk but also identifies the source of value added (tangency portfolio or global minimum variance) ...

The meaning of investments is that you sacrifice something valueable now in order to gain benefit from it in the future. Timing of the investment is of great importance (McDonald & Siegel, 1986, p. 724). One could invest in real assets, i.e. land, buildings, machines, and knowledge which are used in order to produce future goods and services. Investments could also be made in financial assets, such as stocks and bonds, which do not contribute directly to production but are used as claim-holdings on real assets. There are three main types of financial assets: fixed-income or debt securities, derivative securities and equity. Thus, investments operate mainly in financial markets. The major players of the financial market are firms, which mostly raise funds; households, which mostly save; and governments, which may act as borrowers as well as lenders. Since corporations and governments do not sell the largest part of their securities directly to individuals, the role of financial intermediaries is of great importance. Between the security issuer and the ultimate security owner, in most of the cases, financial institutions such as mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies and banks facilitate the process (Bodie et al., 2009, p. 1-33). One of the most common measures of stock and bond market performance is by indexes. Indexes are computed and published daily, providing investors possibilities to easily monitor performance of a particular equity (Bodie et al., 2009, p. 38). As globalization has spread international trade and cross border transactions have increased. Thus, daily information of the performance of indexes from all over the world has become a very important part of daily news for investors.

Due to the fact that Islamic financial securities may consist of ribawi (cash and debt) underlying assets, it is crucially important to discern whether or not the trading of these securities is subject to the Shari'ah rules for bay' al-sarf and bay' al-dayn. If they do not then what criterion is pertinent to their secondary trading; and on what jurisprudential basis? In answer to that question, the current scholarly views and suggested Shari'ah criteria for tradability of Islamic securities are not only diverse, but also at times incongruous with one another. Based on the qualitative approach of text analysis and semi-structured-interviews, this study critically analyse this issue ...

The issue of liquidity and under development of OIC stock markets has caused problems to companies in those countries that seek higher equity capital. Many institutions such as Islamic Development Bank (IDB), International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) and OIC agree that the introduction of the Islamic Depositary Receipts (IDRs) could aid these companies in enhancing their value. As this instrument is yet to be introduced, this study aims to examine the financial implications of cross-listing via the existing Depositary Receipts (DRs). This is done by studying the impact of companies that have resorted to using American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) and Global Depositary Receipts (GDRs) ...

The study investigates the impact of the global financial shocks on the correlations between the stock market and interest rate on the one hand and that between conventional and Islamic stocks on the other. The countries investigated are Malaysia, Indonesia, the U.S., Japan, the U.K., Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar with the sample period from December 2004 to December 2012. Changes in correlations for different time scales or investment horizons levels with wavelet analysis were tested. It was found that correlations among Islamic and conventional stock markets in non-shock periods tend to be ...

Among the available liquidity management instruments in Islamic banking, only sukuk of a particular type meet the requirements of HQLA (in principle) as defined by the Basel Committee and adapted for Islamic finance by the IFSB (Islamic Financial Services Board) (IFSB, 2017). Candidates for HQLA are only international sukuk, i.e. sukuk that are issued in an international currency, sukuk that are also publicly listed, and sukuk that are traded not only locally but also internationally. Sovereigns and international institutions such as the IDB (Islamic Development Bank) have issued almost all sukuk of this caliber. In this PhD thesis, the research will make empirically informed qualitative projections on the outlook for HQL (high quality liquid) sukuk to constitute the LAB (liquid asset buffer) portfolio for an Islamic megabank MDB (multilateral development bank) in the context of a rising global interest rate environment, falling oil prices, and a challenging global environment. Further qualitative projections about the prospects for the sukuk market are made based on a few case studies that encapsulate some of the critical limitation facing the sukuk market.

The changes in equity index composition have a dual impact, first, to the constituent stocks that make up the index and second, to the index funds that track the index. This study investigates the index effect at constituent stocks level and index funds level using Shari'ah blue-chip indices and their corresponding i-ETFs. The findings of this study provide a new evidence on price discovery contrary to index effect reported in conventional index studies. Specifically, the study discovers the index effect in an opposite direction, i.e., additions suffered negative abnormal returns while deletions gained positive abnormal returns around index revision period.

Capital structure which is the mixture of debt and equity capital of a company is very important since it is related to the ability of the company to fulfil the needs of its stakeholders. The main competing theories, which attempts to understand how financing decisions are made, that have emerged and developed over the last decades are the Trade-Off Theory and the Pecking Order Theory. Trade-Off Theory predicts that firms should balance the tax benefits of debt against the cost of debt, therefore firms should have an optimal capital structure. In contrast, Pecking Order Theory does not imply that firms capital structure decision is driven by the notion of optimal ...

Constructing a portfolio or investing in the stock market, without taking into account the firms' debt level is likely to render the control of returns, volatility and systematic risk ineffective. This study focuses on the European stock market which has suffered badly during the 2008 global financial crisis. It is within this context that the role of firm leverage and its relationship to risk and returns are explored. This innovative empirical study tests the leverage effect (on volatility, systematic risk, value at risk and returns) in terms of Shari'ah stock screening, and evaluates it applying random portfolio analysis, wavelet coherency and panel dynamic GMM techniques ...

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.