Increasingly Islamic financial institutions are being pressured by critics to offer profit and loss sharing (PLS) financing for the purpose of entrepreneurial development. We believe the growth of PLS can be incentivized by increasing the participation of Islamic asset managers and mutual funds...

The trading between currencies in Islam when both parties’ responsibilities are postponed to the future has been regarded as non-halal or un-islamic. Since there are many controversies in the area of currency, there have been suggestions to enhance investments in gold to avoid the element of...

Investment in gold has been in demand for the past few years especially in hedging strategies. At the same time, various calls for gold to go back to its historical function even before the coming of Islam have been popular among Islamic scholars due to its characteristic of having intrinsic...

Financialisation of crude oil and its frequent inclusion into investment portfolios raise the demand for analysis of crude oil and stock market indices relationship at various time scales. In this paper, the relationships between crude oil and stock markets in three Islamic stock market indices...

Firm-level analysis of the cost of equity is essential for many financial decision makings, capital structure choice, capital budgeting analysis, performance assessment and firm valuation. This study aims to shed some light on the determinants of cost of equity by analyzing Shariah compliant...

Islamic equity portfolios work with a smaller investment universe given the filtering of non-Shari’ah compliant stocks. It has been theoretically argued that this culminates in suboptimal portfolio diversification which in turn adversely affects risk-adjusted returns. We employ a number of...

The paper is the first attempt to evaluate the role of gold as a hedge (negative or low correlation with equities in normal market conditions) and safe haven (negative or low correlation in times of market turbulence) by using the daily data for gold and Shariah-compliant equities ranging from...

This paper attempts to examine whether a long-run theoretical relationship does indeed exist between the level of inflation in South Africa and the amount of FDI eventually received by the country. It also attempts to provide insight into the purported macroeconomic benefits of the policy of...

Islamic Finance has evolved over the past few decades, and stands at over a trillion dollar today. At the foundations of Islamic finance lay the concept of risk sharing, and the purest form of it in the modern day finance is equity investments. Jurists mostly have a consensus on accepting the...

In this study we were motivated to ascertain whether the profit rates of the investment deposit accounts based on the profit and loss sharing contracts offered by the Islamic banks are truly based on the performance of the underlying assets or otherwise, by taking Malaysia as our case study....