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This study aims to investigate whether a religious environment affects a firm capital structure.

The authors use data from Saudi Arabia with a highly Islamic religious environment. The authors use an extreme bounds analysis (EBA), which provides a reliable analysis of the determinants of capital structure and aids the process of selecting explanatory variables when there is model uncertainty.

The authors find that firms in such an Islamic environment are relatively less leveraged compared to firms in a non-Islamic environment. The authors also find that firms located in an Islamic environment have different determinants of capital structure than firms located in a non-Islamic environment. Specifically, the Islamic society creates decision makers who are more risk averse, thus leading to a preference for corporate financing using internal funds.

The results imply a potential challenge for growth-seeking firms located in religious Islamic societies.

This study is one of the first to examine the determinants of corporate capital structure in Saudi Arabia using EBA.

Although many previous studies have explored the impact of financial development in promoting economic growth, there is relatively little evidence regarding the effect of political institutions on financial development. This chapter offers strong evidence that political Islam and democracy promote the growth of Islamic finance. The authors use a panel estimator and a sample of 13 Muslim democratic countries for the years 1985–2015 to examine the effect of Islamic political parties and democracy on Islamic finance development. The chapter’s findings provide evidences that Islamist power and democracy are key determinants of Islamic finance development in the studied countries. Moreover, democracy can be captured by political elites in emerging countries where institutions are relatively weak.