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...

In this paper, we examine the financial integration process amongst 17 EMU countries from January 2002 to June 2013 over a normal period as well as for the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and Eurozone Debt Crisis (EDC) periods. We classify the economies in three groups (A, B and C) based on their...

We study the behavior and interaction of systematic and idiosyncratic components of risk in a cross-section of U.K. stocks. We find no clear evidence of a trend in any component of total risk, but we document different “regimes” in the behavior of each component of total risk, in their...

This paper proposes a straightforward Markov-switching asset allocation model, which reduces the market exposure to periods of high volatility. The main purpose of the study is to examine the performance of a regime-based asset allocation strategy under realistic assumptions, compared to a buy...

This paper investigates possible spill over effects on the Spot Market due to the initiation of Futures contracts in three different financial markets. According to many analysts there still exists a puzzle regarding the stabilization or destabilization effects of futures contracts. Although the...

This is an exploratory study that attempts to identify and provide empirical evidence on the possible determinants of the market capitalisation of the Harare Stock Exchange (HSE) with the view of understanding the development prospects of the HSE and other similar markets. The study used...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First it aims to compare several GARCH family models in order to model and forecast the conditional variance of German, Swiss, and UK stock market indexes. The main result is that all GARCH family models show evidence of asymmetric effects. Based on the “out...

This paper studies excess market returns in the relatively understudied nancial markets of nine Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries within the context of three variants of the Capital Asset Pricing Model: the static international CAPM; the constant-parameter intertemporal CAPM; and...

This paper conducts a comparative evaluation of the predictive performance of various Value at Risk (VaR) models such as GARCH-normal, GARCH-t, EGARCH, TGARCH models, variance-covariance method, historical simulation and filtred Historical Simulation, EVT and conditional EVT methods. Special...

We empirically investigate the existence of periodically collapsing bubbles in seven Middle East and North African (MENA) financial markets for the period ending in May 2009. We use the Taylor and Peel (1998) residual augmented least square Dickey and Fuller test (RALS DF) to detect the bubbles....