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 focuses on some of the macroeconomic risks that lie ahead for Latin America. The discussion is informed by my work on crises and capital flows and their macroeconomic consequences. The trends and initial conditions that allowed the region to weather the global economic storm of...

In this note, we attempt to place the question of how we got to the global financial crisis that began as the US Subprime debacle in the summer of 2007 in the context of an international and historical comparative setting. It is of some poignancy that the “we” here refers to the wealthiest...

The standard pattern: capital flows into the new “hot” nation, but then stop or reverses forcing painful adjustment. This column presents research based on such episodes from 181 nations during 1980-2007 and for a subset of 66 nations for the 1960-2007 period. If the pattern of the past few...

We highlight in this note how an application of a similar estimation approach as ours to Colombian data for a more recent period following financial and capital account liberalization may find that the money supply is "endogenous" (i.e. demand-determined as long as the exchange rate is heavily...

Financial crises are historically associated with the “4 deadly D’s”: Sharp economic downturns follow banking crises; with government revenues dragged down, fiscal deficits worsen; deficits lead to debt; as debt piles up rating downgrades follow. For the most fortunate countries, the...

This paper has addressed the following questions: Do sovereign credit ratings systematically help predict currency and banking crises? If not, why not? What needs to change? What is the behavior of credit ratings following the crises? Are there important differences in the behavior of credit...