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This paper examines the empirical validity of the tourism-led growth hypothesis in the toptentourist destinations in the world(China, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States)using the quantile-on-quantile (QQ) approach and a new index of tourism activity that combines the most commonly used tourism indicators. This methodology, recently introduced by Sim and Zhou (2015), provides an ideal framework with which to capture the overall dependence structure between tourism development and economic growth. The empirical results primarily show a positive relation between tourism and economic growth for the ten countries considered with substantial variations across countries and across quantiles within each country. The weakest links arenoted for China and Germany,possibly because of the limitedimportance of the tourism sector relative to other major economic activities in those countries. Important country-specific policy implications may be drawn from these findings.

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Abstract. This paper contributes to the current debate on the empirical validity of the decoupling hypothesis of the Islamic stock market from its mainstream counterparts by examining return and volatility spillovers across the global Islamic stock market, three main conventional national stock markets (the US, the UK and Japan) and a number of influential macroeconomic and financial variables over the period from July 1996 to June 2016. To that end, the VAR-based spillover index approach based on the generalized VAR framework developed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) is applied. The empirical analysis shows strong interactions in return and volatility among the global Islamic stock market, the conventional stock markets and the set of major risk factors considered. This finding means that the Islamic equity universe does not constitute a viable alternative for investors who wish to hedge their investments against the vagaries of stock markets, but it is exposed to the same global factors and risks hitting the conventional financial system. Therefore, this evidence leads to the rejection of the decoupling hypothesis of the Islamic stock market from conventional stock markets, which has significant implications for faith-based investors and policy makers in terms of portfolio diversification, hedging strategies and contagion risk.Keywords: Islamic stock market, conventional stock markets, global risk factors, return and volatility spillovers, spillover index approach JEL Classification: C58, G01, G15

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