Increasingly Islamic financial institutions are being pressured by critics to offer profit and loss sharing (PLS) financing for the purpose of entrepreneurial development. We believe the growth of PLS can be incentivized by increasing the participation of Islamic asset managers and mutual funds...

Firm-level analysis of the cost of equity is essential for many financial decision makings, capital structure choice, capital budgeting analysis, performance assessment and firm valuation. This study aims to shed some light on the determinants of cost of equity by analyzing Shariah compliant...

Islamic equity portfolios work with a smaller investment universe given the filtering of non-Shari’ah compliant stocks. It has been theoretically argued that this culminates in suboptimal portfolio diversification which in turn adversely affects risk-adjusted returns. We employ a number of...

The paper is the first attempt to evaluate the role of gold as a hedge (negative or low correlation with equities in normal market conditions) and safe haven (negative or low correlation in times of market turbulence) by using the daily data for gold and Shariah-compliant equities ranging from...

This paper investigates the volatility and correlations of stock returns of some crisis-hit countries such as, US, Greece, Thailand and Malaysia during the major global financial crises since 1992. The paper makes an attempt to address the following two issues: Firstly, to measure the extent of...

Although real estate is believed to be the steady element of a portfolio, volatilities during the global financial crisis has thrown off its “defensive stock” status in terms of optimizing portfolio benefit. Evidence from past research have revealed the same for the Real Estate Investment...

Determination of diversification strategies by investors depends on the nature and magnitude of the relationships existing between different stock markets. Therefore, it is important for international investors to understand the relationship among various markets in order to diversify risk and...

The economic process that Euro Zone countries have gone through created contradictory claims about whether those particular financial markets have converged, which has implications for the portfolio diversification issue for the investors and policy makers alike. Thus, this paper aims to examine...

This paper attempts to analyse the extent of financial integration of two developed (the U.S. and Japan) and two emerging Islamic stock markets (China and India) with the Malaysian Islamic stock market in order for the Malaysian financial traders to make decision about their portfolio...

The Islamic bonds or sukuk market is one of the fastest growing segments of the nearly US$2trillion global Islamic finance industry. However, lack of trading in secondary sukuk markets is a peculiar feature in this sector and both institutional and retail sukuk investors are known to adopt a...