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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between insurance and economic growth for six (developed, emerging and developing) countries over the period of 1980 to 2015. Design/methodology/approach The study applies panel auto-regressive distributed lagged (PMG/ARDL) method to examine long-term and short-term relationship between insurance and economic growth for the USA, the UK, China, India, Malaysia and Pakistan. Findings The authors concluded that there exists a positive and significant relationship between life insurance, non-life insurance, trade openness, stock-market development and economic growth in the long run as p-value is less than 5 per cent. This study also found a significant relationship between employment rate, banking development and economic growth for the long run but the direction is negative. Foreign direct investment shows an insignificant relationship with economic growth in the long run. The results highlighted a significant and positive relationship between non-life insurance and economic growth in the short-run for the USA, the UK, China, India, Malaysia and Pakistan. Moreover, the relationship between life insurance and economic growth is positive and significant for India, Pakistan and the UK. Results reveal a significant but a negative relationship between life insurance and economic growth for the USA, China and Malaysia. Research limitations/implications Analysis is performed for only six countries and results of these six might not represent the whole world. Practical implications This research would help policymaker to consider wider aspects of insurance rather than considering it complementary service industry. Social implications Every individual, today, spends a huge amount of funds to purchase insurance. He or she should be aware of the wider social impact of their spending apart from risk transferring. Originality/value Researchers recently shifted their focus to investigate the relationship between insurance and economic growth but the topic is still lacking sufficient literature and various knowledge gaps. The study is an attempt to contribute in terms of refinement of the already existing body of knowledge and to fill literature gap. In addition, apart from the insurance–economy relationship, very few empirical studies used financial, banking and stock market along with insurance, proxies to measure accurate insurance contribution. Another element of originality lies in the comparative analysis of developed, emerging and developing countries.

The study aimed to investigate the impact of behavioral biases on herding for Islamic financial products with the mediation of shariah literacy. An adopted questionnaire from several published studies was used to collect data. The data were collected from 410 respondents and were analyzed with SmartPLS. The results for the direct impact showed that self-attribution, illusion of control, and information availability have a positive and significant impact on herding for Islamic financial products while shariah literacy showed an insignificant impact on herding. The results for mediation showed that previously significant and positive impact turned to insignificant when shariah literacy was introduced as mediating variable between the illusion of control, self-attribution, information availability, and herding. From a theoretical perspective, this study would contribute to the existing body of knowledge of financial decision making from shariah literacy point-out. On the other hand, the findings of this study may be useful for investors to avoid herding in the Islamic financial markets. The authors synthesize the contribution made by behavioral finance studies in extending the knowledge of herding behavior in Islamic financial products with a mediating role of shariah literacy. The key limitation of the study includes data that were collected from three districts of Punjab, Pakistan.

This research aimed to identify whether improvement in working conditions, children’s classroom behavior and work-life balance can lower teacher burnout ratio in Pakistan’s special schools by using techniques such as emotions regulation. The researcher employed a quantitative research methodology to fulfill the research’s purpose. The data for this research was collected using a questionnaire-based instrument. The confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling techniques were used to test the construct validity and underlying structural relationships. The findings demonstrated that the impacts of all three variables are significant in reducing job burnout in teachers. Emotional regulation helps decrease the impact of working conditions and the children’s behavior. Nevertheless, it does not aid work-life balance as it requires other techniques of emotional regulation. The research is significant as it highlights the importance of overall working conditions’ improvement for teachers working with special needs children. The improvements are essential because the teachers must take extra effort and emotions into their job compared to a typical teacher. The researcher has highlighted the key finding, implications and limitations of this research besides suggesting directions for future research to facilitate peer researchers.

Previous studies found inconsistent results for insurance-growth nexus. The aim of this study is to examine the relationships between life and non-life insurance with economic growth. The study applies pooled mean group method to examine long-term and short-term insurance-growth nexus over the period of 1980 to 2015. The findings of the study show that there exists a positive and significant relationship between life insurance and economic growth in the long-term and short-term for all selected countries, except when insurance penetration is used as a proxy. However, a positive and significant relationship was observed for non-life insurance and economic growth for all four proxies in the longterm and short-term. The relationship between insurance and economic growth is found to be different across countries and across proxies because of diverse factors such as diversity and variety of insurance products, religious and cultural traditions, level of education, and State involvement, not covered in this research.