Premised on the finance-growth-poverty nexus, economic advancement of Muslim countries must be underpinned by a robust financial system. Nonetheless, this measure requires foremost demystifying the riba enigma. In this paper we develop a rational expectations model to study the riba injunction...

The divergence of ownership and management in modern capitalism gave rise to agency theory as a framework for analysing corporate governance. There is now an emerging body of literature questioning the wisdom of the focus on agency theory in business schools. We argue that the poverty of agency...

There is a view that the financial sector of the post-war British economy was in need of reform that was postponed to the detriment of growth for 30 years until liberalisation started in full earnest after the election of 1979. There is another side of the story in this comparison. The first...

We use a bivariate probit model with sample selection to investigate the factors affecting financial exclusion of Bolivian households. We find evidence that for heads of households, being female and indigenous is likely to result in exclusion from formal credit mechanisms, though being employed...

A growing economics literature argues that taxation can strengthen the quality of governance and public sector institutions by making governments more responsive and accountable to their citizens, building capacity, and improving public policy. In this paper, we provide empirical support for...

We examine the intertemporal relation between government revenue and expenditure in the UK during 1750–2004. We pay particular attention to long-run trends by applying a battery of unit root and cointegration techniques to the data, and we use a modified Granger-causality test on data spans...

This unique study employs a rich dataset of ratings from six international agencies to investigate the causes of sovereign split ratings in emerging countries. Three reasons are identified in explaining the relatively high frequency of disagreement across agencies on emerging sovereign ratings....

The ongoing financial crisis has drawn attention to the role of credit rating agencies (CRAs). We investigate the relative impacts of sovereign actions by different CRAs on the share prices of major European banks during the financial crisis. We examine how bank abnormal returns are affected by...

I introduce a novel proxy of investor sentiment and differences of opinion among trendchasing investors to forecast skewness in daily aggregate stock market returns. The new proxy is an easy-to-construct, real time measure available at different frequencies for more than a century. Empirically I...

Purpose This study explores the success and failure of two similar small software technology firms from a marketing perspective, where there is a paucity of research. Using a dyadic approach, this research compares the degree of customer orientation and innovativeness exhibited in both firms by...