WALID BAKRY

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the difference between the determinants of cash holdings of Shariah-compliant and non-Shariah-compliant firms, for non-financial corporations in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).Design/methodology/approachThe data include all non-financial firms listed in six GCC markets over a period 2005–2019. The IdealRatings database is used to identify Shariah-compliant firms in the GCC. To examine the determinants of cash holdings, a static model is used. To confirm the applicability of the method applied, the Breusch–Pagan Lagrange Multiplier (LM) and Hausman (1978) are used to choose the most efficient and consistent static panel regression.FindingsThe results show that, for Shariah-compliant firms, the relevant determinants of cash holdings are leverage, profitability, capital expenditure, net working capital and operating cash flow. For non-Shariah-compliant firms, the only relevant determinants of cash holdings are leverage, net working...

Starting in mid-2014, oil prices began to fall drastically, hereafter this is referred to as the oil price crisis. This paper investigates the impacts of this crisis on earnings management behaviour in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Earnings management is measured in terms of accrual based earning management (AEM) and real activity based earnings management (REM). The modified Jones model is adopted to estimate AEM, and three models from Roychowdhury (2006) are used to estimate REM. The results reveal that companies have tended to use downward REM during the oil price crisis, engaging less with AEM. Control variables covering firm characteristics, including ROA, leverage, growth and OCF exhibit significant relationships with EM. The present study examines EM during the oil price crisis, considering both accrual and real activity earnings management. In contrast to most previous research in this domain which has only considered upward REM, a non-directional approach is use...

Australia has become one of most prolific issuers of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) globally. Due to its convenience, firms issue SEOs as their primary capital raising mechanism particularly during economic disruptions i.e., the early 2000s dot-com bubble, 2008 Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19. Using an event study for ASX 200 firms from 1998 to 2020, we show that there is an increased intensity of SEO abnormal return volatility and volume during economic disruptions. We find evidence of abnormal return volatility and volume in standalone and restricted SEOs being higher relative to combined SEOs. We also identify that higher performing sectors experience larger abnormal return volatility and volume. Finally, using an improved measure of abnormal return volatility, we capture the time varying nature of volatility using GARCH and GJR-GARCH estimations. We highlight that the traditional abnormal return volatility measure tends to be overstated for some SEO types and understated ...

We investigate the relationship between the daily release of COVID-19 related announcements, defensive government interventions, and stock market volatility, drawing upon an extended time period of one year, to independently test, confirm and iteratively improve on previous research findings. We categorize stock markets into emerging and developed markets and consider differences and similarities utilizing an asymmetric measure of volatility. We find that there are major differences between these markets with respect to investors’ interpretation of risk in response to daily new confirmed cases, death rates, recovery rates, and different defensive government interventions. We suggest explanations for these differences, in terms of national culture, and the quality of governance. Moreover, the development of Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine is of immense importance to both markets. The findings have implications for tailoring government responses to crises in country-specific contexts.

This study examines the effect of investor sentiment on the Vietnamese stock market. Using the results of international football matches as exogenous shocks on investor sentiment, and information from two major stock exchanges, we document a link between investor sentiment and stock market returns. In particular, we find a decline in market returns on the subsequent trading days after game losses. Moreover, the effect of investor sentiment on stock market returns is more pronounced between 2015 and 2020 during which football fans exhibited a stronger affection and attention to their teams. The results further depict that the impact of investor sentiment on stock market returns is only significant for small-cap stocks, and when more important tournaments are played.

Public employment in India is often viewed as a source of job security. Hence, public employment seems to propel human security in India away from poverty and social exclusion. In the recent work, a significant attention has been accorded to understand how globalisation has impacted on job security and thereby human security in many developing countries. The literature revolves around two opposing effects of globalisation on the human security in a country: firstly, the efficiency hypothesis posits that globalisation tends to reduce the size of the government of a country to enable the country to attain comparative advantage for gainfully trading in the global economy. A reduction in the capacity of the government is argued to lead to a decline in public employment and, hence, a decline in human security with rising globalisation. Secondly, the compensation hypothesis argues that the size of government, and hence public employment, will increase with globalisation mainly to suitably manage a domestic economy in a complex global setting with an increased role of government for creating social stability and social security. Depending on the relative strengths of the mutually opposing forces of globalisation on public employment, the impact of globalisation on the human security of a country is ambiguous. A gap in the existing literature is a lack of documentation of the Indian experience. In this work, the authors seek to empirically test if globalisation has increased, or decreased, job security in India.

PurposeThis study examines the impact of oil price volatility on firm profitability. As Shariah-compliant firms operate under restrictions, the study also explores whether oil price volatility affects Shariah-compliant firms differently from their non-Shariah-compliant counterparts.Design/methodology/approachThe study sample includes all non-financial firms listed on Gulf Cooperation Council stock exchanges from 2005 to 2019. In evaluating the oil price volatility–profitability relationship, static (panel fixed effects) and dynamic (system generalised method of moments) models were used.FindingsOil price volatility significantly depresses firm profitability. In addition, Shariah-compliant firms are more significantly affected by oil price volatility than their non-Shariah-compliant peers. The results suggest that high oil price volatility exposes Shariah-compliant firms to higher bankruptcy risk than non-Shariah-compliant firms and that positive and negative oil price shocks have as...

The modelling of stock market volatility is considered to be important for practitioners and academics in finance due to its use in forecasting aspects of future returns. The GARCH class models have now firmly established themselves as one of the foremost techniques for modelling volatility in financial markets. The application of GARCH class models in developed and emerging markets (including the Egyptian Stock Market) provides evidence of GARCH effects in stock returns. However, most of the studies conducted on modelling the volatility of stock returns are based on the aggregated market index. This thesis argues that this will not reflect significant differences of variation in the pattern of volatility associated with different stocks. However, in order to examine the similarities and differences between the conditional variance structures of stocks from the same or different industries in the same equity market, this thesis estimates pooled-panel models. These novel models are u...

In this study, we investigated the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on various sectors of the Australian stock market. Market capitalization and equally weighted indices were formed for eleven Australian sectors to examine the influence of the pandemic on them. First, we examined the financial contagion between the Chinese stock market and Australian sector indices through the dynamic conditional correlation fractionally integrated generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (DCC-FIGARCH) model. We found high time-varying correlations between the Chinese stock market and most of the Australian sector indices, with the financial, health care, information technology, and utility sectors displaying a decrease in co-movements during the pandemic. The Modified Iterative Cumulative Sum of Squares (MICSS) analysis results indicated the presence of structural breaks in the volatilities of most of the sector indices around the end of February 2020, but consumer...