The purpose of this paper is to study the direction of causality between the stock market and macroeconomic variables. India is taken as a case study. Although, there have been many studies which attempted to find out the relationship between Indian stock market and economic variables, this...

This paper seeks to close the gap of the lack of empirical evidence surrounding the different impact of conventional interest rates on Islamic finance components – Islamic stock markets, Islamic banking and Islamic insurance (called takaful). Such evidence remains imperative in order for the...

Generally, Shariah (Islamic) indices are considered to have lower portfolio betas relative to conventional ones. The lower portfolio beta of Islamic indexes is a logical result of Shariah screening. As Shariah screening eliminates stocks with high financial leverage, the resulting portfolio beta...

Econometricians had been blamed for the financial crises that occurred due to their giving a ‘false hope’ to investors and policy makers using untested theoretical assumptions. Therefore, econometricians had been challenged to reform their studies by grounding them more solidly on reality....

This paper constructs composite indices of globalization of 131 countries spread over the five continents and classified into World-I, World-II and World-III countries. KOF, the Business Cycle Research Institute in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich is the source of data used in...

This paper uses mixed combinatorial-cum-real particle swarm method to obtain a heuristically optimal order in which the constituent variables can be arranged so as to yield some generalized maximum entropy synthetic indicators that represent the constituent variables in the best...

The paper is an attempt to evaluate the efficiency of Pena’s DP-2 method over a host of methods used to make composite indices. To undertake this exercise, variables and data used and methodology adopted in Human Development Report 2011 are employed along with nine other methodologies employed...

The present study devises a computational scheme (and develops a FORTRAN 77 computer program) that may be appropriate to construct Pena’s DP2 (ordinal) synthetic indicator (Z) from the partial indicators (X) all of which are ordinal (ranking scores). An attempt has also been made to...

It has been said that insurance is the last of the financial services to accept radical change (Denney [1995-1996]). Yet there has been a fundamental shift in the geographic location and in the organization of the reinsurance industry in the last six years (Chichilnisky [19966]). Global...

The paper discusses how and why the theories of neo-classical economics are inadequate to provide a framework to human resource management and therefore must give way to dynamic gradual optimization procedure based on the principles of bounded rationality and satisficing behaviour in dealing...