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This paper aims to examine the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Pakistan, where religiosity is very strongly prevalent. Based on literature, it is conceptualized that the consumers’ perception and awareness about the CSR activities influence their purchase intentions, but the effect from consumers’ CSR perception is to be mediated by their trust in the company and their religious beliefs.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied to investigate the research issue. The qualitative method is applied in the initial phase and conducted in two steps. First, focus groups discussions are conducted to understand the consumers’ knowledge on CSR and other factors influencing their purchase intention. Next, a number of descriptive and interpretive approaches are applied to examine the contents of focus group discussions. A total of three focus groups discussions are conducted in the city of Lahore, Pakistan. Each of the focus group includes 10 individuals from different social classes. Based on the focus group discussion outcomes, a survey is designed to conduct the quantitative study in the next phase. A set of 310 was randomly selected as a convenience sample from the university student population. This non-probability random sampling method ensures data availability for the study, but also risks that the sample might not represent the whole population of the society, and it might be biased by the volunteers.

Based on 230 respondents’ data, it is found that the CSR perception and awareness do influence the purchase intention of consumers, which provides corroborating evidence to confirm that CSR is important for business development in different environments. However, religiosity in society does not play a significant role in determining the effect of CSR perception; but the consumers’ trust in the CSR activities of companies is found to be an important factor. Therefore, it is concluded that CSR has a business value if the consumers have a good perception of CSR which is determined by their trust in the company, but not by the religious orientations. Hence, companies need not overemphasize religious aspects in CSR campaigns, instead working on the building of consumers’ trust is more important.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a widely studied issue because of increasing pressure from global society to ensure ethical corporate behavior. However, there is a trend to dress up CSR within the broader business framework because CSR initiatives eventually pay off through expanding business as result of more engagement with the customers and society. Because the social structure widely varies across the world, it is important to understand how the different social dynamics influence CSR initiatives and their impact on the customers’ buying decisions. This paper examined the issue in Pakistan, where religiosity is very strongly prevalent. Based on literature, it is conceptualized that the consumers’ perception and awareness about the CSR activities influence their purchase intention, but the effect from consumers’ CSR perception is to be mediated by their trust in the company and their religious beliefs. The survey study using 230 respondents’ data confirm that CSR perception and awareness positively influence consumers’ purchase intention. This corroborating evidence generally suggests that CSR initiatives may add value for the companies in different environments.

This paper aims to investigate a fundamental research question of whether the Islamic banking business model makes corporate earnings more uncertain. This question arises because prior research shows that Islamic banks do well in loan performance but incur more operational costs than conventional banks, indicating the systemic limitation of Islamic banks in business risk management.

The study used a sample of banks to conduct the panel regression analysis with 15 years of data for 532 banks (129 Islamic and 403 conventional) from 23 Muslim countries across the world. The authors estimate earnings uncertainty in two ways: the spread and standard deviation of the country-adjusted return over the sample period and applied the difference-in-difference approach interacting cost to income ratio with the Islamic bank dummy, checking if Islamic bank’s high operational costs contribute to more earning uncertainty.

Islamic banks’ returns on assets are significantly more uncertain than conventional banks due to higher operational costs. Consistent with earlier evidence, the study also finds that Islamic banks generally have fewer nonperforming loans than conventional banks. The authors conclude that Islamic banks trade-off between reducing credit risk and escalating business risk.

This study documents that the Islamic banking model helps build a safer asset portfolio but gives rise to the uncertainty of corporate earnings. Therefore, the choice between Islamic and conventional banking models involves a trade-off between credit and business risks. It is a new finding that we add to the literature body on Islamic finance.

Performance assessment of microfinance institutions (MFIs) has long been a question of considerable research interest. The dual goals – financial performance and social performance of MFIs widely studied yet remain unsolved in the existing literature. To assess the knowledge structure of research in this area and to aid future research, we review the literature with bibliometric analysis.

Our study has used bibliographic data of 1,252 scientific documents indexed in the Scopus database from 1995 to 2020 (June 05). We have used the “bibliometrix” package in R language to analyze the data and illustrate the findings.

We find that there has been an increasing trend in publications, especially from 2006 onwards. Various bibliometric indicators allow us to follow the progression of knowledge along with identifying the most contributing and impactful authors, publication sources, institutions and countries. We illustrate the major research themes and identify that “poverty alleviations”, “group lending” and “credit scoring” are the major emerging and specialized themes besides the basic research evolved around “microfinance” or “microcredit”. Our further analysis of thematic evolution over different time frames reveals that “financial performance” aspect is getting more attention in recent times in evaluating the performance of MFIs.

The insights of knowledge accumulated from our bibliometric review and thematic analysis provide researchers with an efficient comprehension of the advancement of the research on microfinance performance and offer avenues for future scientific endeavors.

Negative relationship between the return of a stock and its liquidity suggests that the illiquid stocks are riskier than liquid stocks. Thus, researchers tend to include the stock liquidity as a variable in asset pricing models, where the stock and market liquidities are usually considered as independent. The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the relationship between the return of a stock and its liquidity by using a relative measure that links the individual stock liquidity with market‐wide liquidity.

Multivariate regressions are employed to examine the effect of relative market liquidity on the stock return while controlling the effects of other factors.

Negative relationship between the stock return and liquidity is confirmed, but the relationship is not linear. It is found that the relative measure of liquidity is not a substitute, but complement to other liquidity measures used in prior studies. It is also found that fluctuation in relative stock liquidity does not positively affect the return.

The study is conducted on New York Stock Exchange and American Stock Exchange exchanges using monthly data. The robustness tests using the daily or weekly data are not conducted.

Findings may suggest that investors do not seriously concern about the fluctuations of individual stock liquidity, provided that the stock liquidity is higher than the average market liquidity.

For the first time, the liquidity risk is tested using a relative measure instead of an absolute measure. Since fluctuation in stock liquidity does not positively affect the return, a new question arises whether the variability in liquidity can reflect the liquidity risk.

Islamic banking (IB) has witnessed remarkable growth in the past decade. The purpose of this study is to explore some factors that are influencing the choice of Islamic banking and finance (IBF) products and services in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a predominantly Muslim country.

Students enrolled at a university located in a major emirate in the UAE were asked to respond to a survey on factors underlying their decision to open an account at an Islamic bank. Responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics, analysis of variance and regression analysis.

Results indicate that the decision to open an account with an Islamic bank is influenced by consumer expectations regarding the conformity of the bank’s operations with Islamic principles, as well as consumers’ Arab language skills. Variables such as consumers’ nationality, gender, education and familiarity with IB do not have a significant influence on the decision to open an account at an Islamic bank.

The study focuses on university students from a certain Emirate only, which somewhat limits the generalizability of the research results. Nevertheless, the findings of this study may potentially provide some practical insights for further improving and promoting IB, with special reference to the UAE youth market segment.

The research is original in nature, particularly as there have not been many instances where the choice of potential consumers (university students) regarding IB and finance services has been explored within the IB sector in a predominantly Muslim nation such as the UAE, an emerging Gulf economy. Consequently, the research findings have important implications for Islamic banks operating in a predominantly Islamic environment.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of religiosity on consumer attitudes and purchase intentions toward Islamic banks.

The study takes place in the Tunisian context. Even though Tunisia is a Muslim country, the culture is considerably different from those of the Middle East or Malaysia (countries where the majority of studies on Islamic banks have taken place). Consequently, an adapted religiosity scale was developed to fit the study’s context. Then, the scale was pre-tested on a sample of 188 respondents. In order to test the research hypotheses, a second data collection, based on a convenience sampling technique, was undertaken, yielding a sample of 217 respondents.

The religiosity variable was found to be tridimensional. Results show that the more a person fears divine punishment, the more he/she will develop a favorable attitude towards Islamic banks. Also, the more a person believes in Islamic laws, the more favorable his/her attitude towards Islamic banks. However, the relationship between religious involvement (practice and interest) and attitude toward Islamic banks is found to be insignificant. Other alternative models were tested and the results indicate that neither fear, nor beliefs, nor religious involvement has a direct effect on purchase intention. Thus, religiosity has an indirect effect on purchase intentions of Islamic bank services through attitude towards these banks.

It is suggested that a communication strategy focusing on the compatibility of Islamic banks with Islamic beliefs and eliminating any doubt that Islamic bank operations are suspicious (from a religious point of view) could attract a segment of consumers who wish to be in harmony with the prescriptions of their religion. Islamic banks can better position their offers compared to conventional banks and improve the perception of actual or potential clients. The study offers some implications to managers of conventional banks as well.

Previous studies have reported the strong impact of religion on Muslims’ attitude towards Islamic banks. The main contribution of this study is to show which dimension of religiosity has the most important impact on attitude and purchase intention toward Islamic banks.

This study aims to deal with the numerical investigation of ferrofluid flow and heat transfer inside a right-angle triangular cavity in the presence of a magnetic field. The vertical wall is partially heated, whereas other walls are kept cold. The effects of thermal radiation are included in the analysis. The governing equations including continuity, momentum and energy equations are converted to nondimensional form using viable variables.

Finite element method (FEM)-based simulations are performed using finite element approach to investigate the effects of the volume fraction of ferroparticles (Fe₃O₄), the length of the heating element and the dimensionless numbers including Rayleigh and Hartmann numbers on the streamlines, isotherms and Nusselt number.

It is demonstrated that both horizontal and vertical velocity components increase with the length of the heating element, whereas the dimensionless temperature decreases the heating domain. It is observed that an increase of 10% in the volume fraction of ferroparticles increases Nusselt number more than 12%, and 20% increase in the volume fraction of ferroparticles increases more than 30%, depending upon the length of the heating element.

This is a new study showing the significance of the magnetic nanoparticles for the enhancement of heat transfer rate in a triangular cavity.

The purpose of this study is to examine factors influencing decisions to repurchase shares on-market in Australia. The present study also examines the role of board size, board independence and chief executive officer duality on the decision to repurchase shares on-market by Australian firms.

This study blends the traditional motivations of share repurchases with the influences of governance. The sample consists of all non-financial firms included in the Australian All Ordinaries Index (AOI) for the period 2004-2010. The repurchase sample consists of 104 repurchases undertaken by 62 firms. A probit panel model is used to analyse the decision to repurchase shares on the market. To account for unobserved heterogeneity, random effects panel models are also used.

Analyses of a sample of non-financial firms included in the AOI for the period 2004-2010 show that size is significantly positively correlated with the decision to repurchase shares, thus supporting the agency cost. Findings also support the undervaluation and signalling hypotheses. Similarly, there is evidence in support of the view that firms repurchase shares to reach their target optimal capital structure. The present study also finds a significant positive association between board independence and the decision to repurchase shares in Australia.

On-market share repurchases help firms to signal their future growth opportunities and resolve agency conflicts. Signals from repurchases also help markets discover the true fundamental values of firms. Governance plays an important role in improving the effectiveness of on-market share repurchases, as independent directors provide both monitoring and discipline which helps to ensure that firms have valid motivations in undertaking share repurchases.

These findings have implications for capital restructuring and governance policies. Principle-based governance frameworks that prevail in countries like Australia work as well as rule-based governance.

This study highlights the complementary roles that financial policies and corporate boards play in corporate governance. Independent boards ensure that firms pursue appropriate financial policies that help resolve agency conflicts and information asymmetry problems.

This paper aims to examine the informational efficiency in retail credit markets to test whether behavioral biases (excessive optimism) by some participants in the banking industry might explain how credit booms are fueled by the banking sector.

This paper analyzes the conditions for the efficient market hypothesis approach to be extended to bank-based systems. A simple model of herding and limits of arbitrage that follows a three-step behavioral approach is presented (Shleifer, 2000). The model is based on duopolistic Cournot competition, where one bank is unbiased and the other is boundedly rational in terms of excessive optimism.

The paper shows why solely behavioral biases by participants in the banking industry explain how it feeds a credit bubble. According to the presented model, optimistic banks would lead the industry, while it would be rational for unbiased banks to herd under conditions that the authors derive. An important finding is the role of limits of arbitrage in the banking sector: there would be no incentives for rational banks to correct the misallocations of their biased competitors.

It might be a valid contribution to the current debate on macroprudential regulation. Should tests of rationality and correlated behavior provide evidence on the pervasiveness of behavioral biases in the banking industry suggested by our model, then banking regulation should account for it.

This paper introduces an alternative approach to analyze informational efficiency in the banking industry that, to the best of our knowledge, had not been raised so far. The model shows how behavioral biases might guide retail credit markets and why limits of arbitrage would be more pervasive in bank-based financial systems than in market-based ones.

The aim of this study is to investigate the corporate financing behaviour of nonfinancial Greek listed companies, focusing on how managers determine optimal capital structure.

The study analyses the results derived from questionnaires submitted to the companies' chief financial officers (CFOs), using both descriptive and nonparametric statistics.

The results broadly support the pecking order hypothesis over static trade-off theory. Firms listed on the Athens Stock Exchange prefer to use internal rather than external financing. A deeper examination of the systematic relationship between a number of variables and the financing decision provides tentative support for the existence of asymmetrically distributed information in the market and demonstrates a series of significant correlations among the determinative factors of a new long-term investment.

This paper fills the existing gap between prominent theories of corporate leverage and empirical evidence. The questionnaire collects primary research data that are not available from public sources and reports CFOs' opinions and practices in the field.