Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing body of work in the area of Islamic microfinance by examining the co-operative nature of Islamic financial services providers (IFSPs) in Australia. Design/methodology/approach – The method employed in this study is a...

The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 repeals the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act (1933) and the Bank Holding Company Act (1956) and allows insurance firms for the first time to merge with banks and cross sell non-traditional insurance products. Previous studies suggest that such an...

The objective of the paper is to investigate whether the stock price reactions of commercial banks to monetary policy actions are dependent on the state of the economy. The results indicate that monetary policy actions have asymmetric effects on the returns of commercial banks across different...

Using the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA), this study investigates the cost and profit efficiency effects of bank mergers on the US banking industry. We also use the non-parametric technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate the production structure of merged and non-merged...

This paper examines the stability, predictability, volatility, time varying risk premiums and persistence of shocks to volatility in the ten Middle Eastern and African (ME&A) emerging stock markets. Although the majority of ME&A markets only recently gained emerging status, one finds that five...