This paper investigates the stimulating role of natural resource abundance in financial development for the case of the USA over the period of 1960-2016. We included education, economic growth and capitalization as additional determinants of financial development in finance demand function. Thus, we applied traditional and recent unit root tests, accommodating unknown structural breaks in the series for examining the unit root properties of the variables. To examine cointegration between the variables, we apply the Bayer-Hanck cointegration approach. The robustness of cointegration relationship is tested by applying the bounds testing approach to cointegration. The empirical results show the presence of cointegration between financial development and its determinants. In the long run, we observe that natural resource abundance contributes to financial development. Education has a positive impact on financial development. A positive relationship exists between economic growth and financial development. Capitalization is inversely linked with financial development. The causality analysis reveals a feedback effect between natural resource abundance and financial development i.e. natural resource abundance causes financial development; in turn, financial development Granger causes natural resource abundance. This empirical evidence provides new insights for policy makers to use natural resource abundance as an economic tool to improve the performance of financial sector by considering the role of economic growth and education.
The issue of whether stock prices and exchange rates are related or not has received considerable attention after the East Asian crisis. During the crisis the countries affected saw turmoil in both currency and stock markets. If stock prices and exchange rates are related and the causation runs from exchange rates to stock prices, then the crisis in the stock markets can be prevented by controlling the exchange rates. Moreover, developing countries can exploit such a link to attract/stimulate foreign portfolio investment in their own countries. Similarly, if the causation runs from stock prices to exchange rates then authorities can focus on domestic economic policies to stabilise the stock market. If the two markets/prices are related then investors can use this information to predict the behaviour of one market using the information on other market.1 Most of the empirical literature that has examined the stock prices-exchange rate relationship has focused on examining this relationship for the developed countries with very little attention on the developing countries. The results of these studies are, however, inconclusive. Some studies have found a significant positive relationship between stock prices and exchange rates [for instance Smith (1992); Solnik (1987) and Aggarwal (1981)] while others have reported a significant negative relationship between the two [e.g., Soenen and Hennigar (1998)]. On the other hand, there are some studies that have found very weak or no association between stock prices and exchange rates [for instance, Franck and Young (1972); Bartov and Bodnor (1994)].
PurposeThis study analyzes the inflation hedging of Islamic and conventional equities by employing 26 indices for the period ranging from January 1996 till August 2018. The authors investigate the decoupling hypothesis for Islamic versus conventional equities across various investment horizons.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ a vector autoregressive framework coupled with bootstrapping procedure to compute inflation hedging measures. The hedging measures employed account for the inflation hedging capacity in terms of hedging effectiveness as well as the cost of hedging (efficiency). The authors account for various investment horizons ranging from one month to ten years.FindingsAlthough, the authors do not find consistent evidence for the decoupling hypothesis of Islamic and conventional equities in terms of their inflation hedging capacity. However, the authors document that certain Islamic equity indices can be employed to effectively hedge against the risk of inflation.Originality/valueThe main contribution of this study is that the existing literature on the comparative performance of Islamic versus conventional equities against inflation risk is sparse. The purpose of this study is to analyze the inflation hedging attributes of Islamic versus conventional equities, that is, whether Islamic equities render better real returns than their conventional counterparts. It will contribute to the growing literature on the comparison between Islamic and conventional equities by documenting the real return attributes of these two, apparently different, assets. A further contribution is that in order to account for the different investment horizons for different types of investors, this study will quantify the real return attributes of Islamic and conventional equities for short-, medium- and long-term investors.
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