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Business confidence is crucial to firm decisions, but it is deeply related to professional forecasters' expectations. Since Brazil is an important inflation targeting country, this paper investigates whether monetary policy credibility and disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations relate to business confidence in Brazil. The study considers the aggregate business confidence index and the business confidence indexes for 11 industrial sectors in Brazil.

The authors run ordinary least squares and generalized method of moments regressions to assess the direct effects of disagreements in expectation and monetary policy credibility on business confidence. The authors also make use of Wald test of parameter equality to observe whether there are “offsetting effects” of monetary credibility in mitigating the effects of both disagreements in expectations on business confidence. Besides, the authors run quantile regressions to analyze the effect of the main explanatory variables of interest on business confidence in contexts where business confidence is low (pessimistic) or high (optimistic).

Disagreements in inflation expectations reduce business confidence, monetary policy credibility improves business confidence and credibility mitigates the adverse effects of disagreements in expectations on business confidence. The sectors most sensitive to monetary policy credibility are Rubber, Motor Vehicles, Metallurgy, Metal Products and Cellulose. The findings also suggest the effect of disagreement in inflation expectations on business confidence decreases as confidence increases, and the effect of monetary policy credibility on business confidence increases as entrepreneurs are more optimistic.

While there is evidence that monetary policy credibility is beneficial to the economy, there are no studies on the effects of disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations on business confidence (at the aggregate and sectoral levels). Besides, there are no studies that have investigated whether monetary policy credibility can mitigate the effects of disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations on business confidence (at the aggregate and sectoral levels). Therefore, there are gaps to be filled in the literature addressing business confidence, monetary policy credibility and disagreements in expectations. These issues are particularly important to inflation targeting developing countries.

This paper investigates the effect of the short sale ban by the Korean government on the relationship between the disagreement among investors and the future stock returns. Short selling in Korean stock market was banned twice in 2008 and 2011. The short sale ban provides a natural experiment environment to study the effect of the short sale constraints on the relationship between the disagreement among investors and the future stock returns. Furthermore, it is an exogenous shock in the point of individual stocks. Thus, this paper focus on short sale ban periods to analyzes the stock return predictability of the disagreement among investors’ opinions about analysts’ earnings forecasts. Main results of this paper are as follows: First, the portfolio within the top 30% of the disagreement among investors experiences the significantly higher returns than that within the bottom 30% of the disagreement only during short sale ban periods. However, the two portfolio returns are not significantly different during the other periods excluding the short sale ban periods. These results are robust even after controlling for firm sizes, boot to market ratios, and the momentum effects. Second, a portfolio with higher the disagreement among investors presents significantly positive abnormal returns estimated by Fama-French’s three factor model during short sale ban periods. On the other hand, the abnormal returns of the portfolio with lower the disagreement among investors are not significantly different from zero. Furthermore, those returns of the portfolio with lower disagreement are not affected by the short sale ban. Finally, our findings show that individual stock returns are positively related to disagreement after controlling for the characteristics of individual stocks. Consequentially, the stocks with higher disagreement are overvalued during the short sale ban periods according to our robust empirical analyses with various control variables. According to our findings, we conclude that the short sale constraints are important factors to determine the predictability of disagreement on future stock returns. These are consistent with the results of short sale ban on the U.S. stock market from Autore, Billingsley, and Kovacs (2011).

The purpose of this paper is to review the recent studies on opinion polarization and disagreement.

In this work, recent advances in opinion polarization and disagreement and pay attention to how they are evaluated and controlled are reviewed.

In literature, three metrics: polarization, disagreement and polarization-disagreement index are usually adopted and there is a tradeoff between polarization and disagreement. Different strategies have been proposed in literature which can significantly control opinion polarization and disagreement based on these metrics.

This review is of crucial importance to summarize works on opinion polarization and disagreement and to the better understanding and control of them.

The authors examine the effect of split environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings on information asymmetry, corporate value and trading behavior. The authors test the risk-based hypothesis and the optimism-bias hypothesis on the relationship between diverging opinions and future stock prices. The authors results show that split ESG ratings is positively related to idiosyncratic volatility, an alternative measure for information asymmetry. Further, the negative effect of split ESG ratings on cumulative abnormal return under short-selling constraints is consistent with the optimism bias hypothesis. The authors find a negative relationship between split ESG ratings and the net purchase ratio (NPR) of pension funds. Considering that the NPR is a direct measure of net demand, ESG disagreement may hinder socially responsible investing (SRI) in a firm. This study directly demonstrates the negative effect of ESG disagreement on firm value and investment by Korea's National Pension Service (NPS). The results offer valuable insights into policymakers, as the wide divergence in ESG ratings requires urgent attention to expand SRI.

From the standpoint of a policy maker who has access to a number of expert forecasts, the uncertainty of a combined or ensemble forecast should be interpreted as that of a typical forecaster randomly drawn from the pool. This uncertainty formula should incorporate forecaster discord, as justified by (i) disagreement as a component of combined forecast uncertainty, (ii) the model averaging literature, and (iii) central banks’ communication of uncertainty via fan charts. Using new statistics to test for the homogeneity of idiosyncratic errors under the joint limits with both T and n approaching infinity simultaneously, the authors find that some previously used measures can significantly underestimate the conceptually correct benchmark forecast uncertainty.

The authors examine the contemporaneous and causal association between tweet features (bullishness, message volume and investor agreement) and market features (stock returns, trading volume and volatility) using 140 South African companies and a dataset of firm-level Twitter messages extracted from Bloomberg for the period 1 January 2015 to 31 March 2020.

Panel regressions with ticker fixed-effects are used to examine the contemporaneous link between tweet features and market features. To examine the link between the magnitude of tweet features and stock market features, the study uses quantile regression.

No monotonic relationship is found between the magnitude of tweet features and the magnitude of market features. The authors find no evidence that past values of tweet features can predict forthcoming stock returns using daily data while weekly and monthly data shows that past values of tweet features contain useful information that can predict the future values of stock returns.

The study is among the earlier to examine the association between textual sentiment from social media and market features in a South African context. The exploration of the relationship across the distribution of the stock market features gives new insights away from the traditional approaches which investigate the relationship at the mean.

Islamic banks are obliged to carry out transactions that only comply with Islamic commercial laws. Malaysia has been championing the Sharīʿah-based banking system, and so, continuous improvement on the compliance level of the institutions offering Islamic financial services is key to its global recognition in this industry. One of the issues that can affect deposit products is existence of a sale contract and loan facility in one transaction. Famous prophetic tradition prohibits this. Hence, this paper aims to examine the linkage between bayʿwa salaf (combination between a sale contract and loan in one transaction) and deposits accounts in Malaysia.

The subject matter of this paper is one that is researchable within library-based research. It is on this premise the research used the non-empirical qualitative research methodology. It used inductive method of analysis of both Islamic and policy documents on Islamic banking in Malaysia. Literature from Islamic jurisprudence, websites of some of the Islamic banks in Malaysia and relevant resolutions from the Shariah Advisory Council of Central Bank of Malaysia were consulted.

Based on the methodology mentioned above, the researchers arrived at the following findings: that, although there is no juristic disagreement about the prohibition of bayʿwa salaf, disagreement, however, occurs in results of some contracts. The most notable area of agreement on the existence of bayʿwa salaf is when there is express stipulation of sale or rendering of service and express or implied stipulation of loan alongside of the sale or service rendering. In an organized reversed tawarruq, the use of these deposits by the banks is regarded as loan from the depositors to the banks, who will soon put the money into sale that will generate profit to be divided between the banks and their depositors. However, this study finds that this is not bayʿwa salaf prohibited by the prophetic tradition.

The originality of this topic is proven by the new banking regulation regime of Malaysia, which compels Islamic banks to guarantee all deposits under them. As Islamic banks carry out their banking activities through trading, there is need to conduct a research such as this. This is to examine whether Islamic banks’ unilateral use of depositors’ funds in non-investment accounts which is translated, constructively, as loan from the depositors to Islamic banks amounts to bayʿwa salaf before the future tawarruq. Here there is loan and sale, which is the tawarruq. Hence, the need to do this research.

Scholars and practitioners alike wish to understand what makes workplace conflict beneficial or injurious to, for example, performance and satisfaction. The authors focus on parties’ personal experience of the conflict, which is complementary to studying conflict issues (i.e. task- or relationship-related conflict). Although many authors discuss the personal experience of conflict, which the authors will refer to as conflict personalization, different definitions are used, leading to conceptual vagueness. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop an integrative definition of the concept of conflict personalization.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review to collect definitions and conceptualizations from 41 publications. The subsequent thematic analysis revealed four building blocks that were used to develop an integrative definition of conflict personalization.

The authors developed the following definition: Conflict personalization is the negative affective as well as cognitive reaction to the self being threatened and/or in danger as a result of a social interaction about perceived incompatibilities.

The integrative definition of this study enables the development of a measurement instrument to assess personalization during workplace conflict, paving the way for developing effective research-based interventions.

Conceptual vagueness hampers theoretical development, empirical research and the development of effective interventions. Although the importance of conflict personalization is mentioned within the field of workplace conflict, it has not been empirically studied yet. This paper can serve as the basis for future research in which conflict issue and personal experience are separated.