Islamic banking is consistent with Islamic law and guided by Islamic economics. They are prohibited from charging or paying interest, and can operate only on the basis of the profit-sharing arrangements. Islamic banking has been gaining momentum on a global scale for the last 30 years. It is...

This paper investigates the stochastic nature of the unemployment rate allowing for cross-section dependence from a panel of US state-level data. We employ the PANIC method to test the null of nonstationarity for the common and idiosyncratic components separately. We find significant evidence of...

We evaluate the usefulness of bias-correction methods for autoregressive (AR) models in terms of out-of-sample forecast accuracy, employing two popular methods proposed by Hansen (1999) and So and Shin (1999). Our Monte Carlo simulations show that these methods do not necessarily achieve better...

Closed-end fund (CEF) prices often exhibit large and persistent deviations from their associated net asset values (NAVs), which is puzzling considering that NAVs are publicly observable for CEFs, which essentially represent repackaged financial assets. The persistence of these deviations is...