Although natural disasters have been found to influence economic growth, their impact on income inequality has not yet been explored. This paper uses cross-country panel data during the period 1965 to 2004 to examine how the occurrence of natural disasters has affected income inequality. The...

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...

The worldwide colossal failures of financial institutions in the wake of the 2007–2010 financial turmoil the yesteryear advocates of liberalization and privatization converted almost overnight into vocal supporters of raising the safety walls around the interests of various stakeholders,...

This paper attempts to examine whether a long-run theoretical relationship does indeed exist between the level of inflation in South Africa and the amount of FDI eventually received by the country. It also attempts to provide insight into the purported macroeconomic benefits of the policy of...

Islamic Finance has evolved over the past few decades, and stands at over a trillion dollar today. At the foundations of Islamic finance lay the concept of risk sharing, and the purest form of it in the modern day finance is equity investments. Jurists mostly have a consensus on accepting the...

In this study we were motivated to ascertain whether the profit rates of the investment deposit accounts based on the profit and loss sharing contracts offered by the Islamic banks are truly based on the performance of the underlying assets or otherwise, by taking Malaysia as our case study....

Empirical studies have shown that preferences for redistribution are significantly correlated with expectations of future mobility and the belief that society offers equal opportunities. We add to previous research by investigating the role of individual and social norms on rent seeking. We find...

This paper uses inter-country panel data obtained during the period 1990 to 2010 to examine how the occurrence of natural disasters has affected corruption within the public sector. There are a number of major findings from this study. (1) Natural disasters lead to corruption within the public...

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...