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This paper aims to measure investors' perception of the rights issue announcement of publicly listed companies in five stock markets of Islamic countries. Then, these firms are grouped according to their debt level to examine whether abnormal returns are different from those that are highly leveraged. Moreover, Sharīʿah compatibility of firms is checked to understand if return anomaly shows different behaviour around rights issue announcement days.

The analysis period includes the years 2010–2019, which includes 362 rights issue announcements. The event study methodology is applied to measure the level of impact that is triggered by the rights issue announcements. Hereafter, one-way ANOVA test is performed to identify whether there exists a difference among the sample groups according to their debt level.

Findings suggest that rights issue announcements cause −3.90% fall in share prices on average for the whole sample. However, negative abnormal return is found significant only in Egypt and Turkey. Individual regression analysis results suggest that an increase in debt level worsens the return anomaly only in Egypt. This refers that the rights issue announcement is perceived as less favourable for highly leveraged companies compared to others in this country. Finally, Sharīʿah-compliant companies show better performance compared to non-compliant counterparts around the event dates.

This paper is novel in evaluating market reaction during rights issue announcements in multiple Islamic countries. Also, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to compare return behaviour of Sharīʿah-compliant and non-compliant firms around the rights issue announcements.

The objective of this study is to present a theoretical framework, which helps ascertain the meanings of the Sharīʿah audit quality and identify the factors that affect it.

The current literature of conventional and Islamic finance on audit quality is critically reviewed to propose the theoretical framework for the quality of Sharīʿah audit.

The paper suggests that for a better Sharīʿah compliance at Islamic banking institutions (IBIs), the role of audit practitioners is very much indispensable. The competency of the practitioner is one of the important factors that affect the quality of the Sharīʿah audit. Assessment and identification of Sharīʿah risk in different financial arrangements, contracts and transactions require a unique competency on the part of the auditor, that is, gripping Sharīʿah law besides traditional assurance skills and techniques.

The Sharīʿah compliance is one of the primary objectives of IBIs, which works at the conceptual level, product development and implementation level, various business models and governance level. Sharīʿah audit function, internal or external, is an important component of Sharīʿah governance framework and provides an independent assessment of IBIs’ compliance with the Sharīʿah rules and principles and helps in managing the Sharīʿah non-compliance risk and ensuring sound internal Sharīʿah control system.

The paper proposes a theoretical framework for defining the Sharīʿah audit quality and determining the factors that are significant in affecting the Sharīʿah audit quality in the IBIs of Pakistan.

Capacity building in fragile and post‐conflict situations is specially challenging for policy makers in that it represents a situation that needs to be carefully managed. Understanding the dynamic link between capacity building and conflict requires understanding the nature and determinants of conflicts, their duration, intensity and the modalities for their cessation and post‐conflict reconstruction. This study attempted to do that from systemic or theoretical perspective. A major common theme that runs across the literature is that post‐conflict recovery and sustainable development and the associated capacity building exercise in Africa need to have the following four feature: (1) first a broad development planning framework with a fairly long‐time horizon and an overarching objective of poverty reduction; (2) second, social policy‐making in such countries is expected to be distinct from non‐conflict countries. This signals the need to articulate country specific policies and (3) third, intervention in such states requires a high volume of aid flows and (4) forth it need to be preceded by deeper understanding of African societies by donors. This study by outlining such basic issues from theoretical perspective resorted to an outline of three core areas of capacity building that are needed in post‐conflict and fragile states: capacity building to address immediate needs of post‐conflict states, capacity building to address the core economic and political causes of conflict, as well as, capacity building to address issues of finance and financial sector reconstruction. Each of these aspects is discussed in detail in the study. The study underscores the need to view and understand capacity building exercise as part and parcel of a broad developmental problem which requires broader developmental solutions.

THE performance of an axial‐flow compressor is most easily analysed in terms of the characteristics of each stage, by which is meant each pair of blade rows. Usually one row rotates on a central shaft and the other is fixed to an outer casing.

Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine wage differences between part- and full-time workers distinguishing by gender by using a large Spanish matched employer-employee data set and an econometric decomposition that permits to decompose wage differences by quantiles of the wage distribution.

The research is based on cross-section matched employer-employee microdata from a large representative survey (the Encuesta de Estructura Salarial) which is carried out with a harmonised methodology common to all European Union member countries and that has been designed specifically to provide reliable evidence about characteristics of the wage distribution such us wage differentials associated with the type of working time. From a methodological point of view, the econometric decomposition technique proposed recently by Fortin et al. (2011) to decompose wage differences between part-time and full-time workers by quantiles of the wage distribution is applied. This methodology has the advantage over similar techniques that provides a detailed decomposition of wage differentials and has not been used before to examine the wage impact of part-time jobs.

The results show that the significant raw wage gap that part-time workers experience in Spain differs substantially along the wage distribution. In the case of part-time females, the wage disadvantage is mostly explained by their relative endowments of characteristics (and particularly by their lower endowments of human capital and their segregation into low-wage sectors) but a significant wage penalty still persists, increasing along the wage distribution. In the case of males the wage disadvantage is only found in the lower part of the distribution and it is due both to their worst endowments of characteristics and a significant wage penalty.

The evidence for Spain shows that the part-time work tends to affect differently to the wages of males and females, with a higher part-time penalty for males, as predicted by the “flexibility stigma” hypothesis, and penalising low-qualified men in the lower part of the wage distribution and high-qualified women in the upper part of the distribution the most.

The analysis contributes to the literature by examining wage differences along the wage distribution for both genders using econometric decomposition methods, an aspect that to the authors’ knowledge has been examined only scarcely in the international literature with non-conclusive evidence and has not been examined in previous studies for the Spanish case. In this vein, Spain is a particularly interesting analysis case from an international perspective of the wage consequences of part-time jobs, given that in contrast with most other advanced countries a majority of part-time employment in this country is involuntary and this phenomenon is especially affecting disadvantaged groups.

World legends and the scientific community have taken the devastating impact of poverty issue seriously which has been reflected in the growing trend of research in this area. Hence, this paper aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis on poverty alleviation literature, discuss the various dimensions of poverty alleviation and deliver some ideas for future research.

This study deploys a combined quali-quantitative method familiar as meta-literature review on 454 articles collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database with Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) coverage over the period 1971–2020. Using Rstudio, VOSviewer and Excel, the collected data have been analysed from different lenses.

This study considers the most contributing scientific actors like authors, journals, topics, institutions and countries as parameters for analysing articles. Based on the analysis from various perspectives, it determines five main research streams upon which it provides some potential research directions to be considered in future research.

This study solely relies on the articles available in the WoS database with index in SSCI. However, it excludes analysing thousands of articles on the same topic available in other platforms.

This study provides a retrospective on the scientific works and collective efforts of scholars germane to poverty alleviation from the highest ranked journals, which would help better understand the literature development and the intellectual structure of this field.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of socially inclusive Building Information Modelling (BIM) library components. BIM requires and integrates many sets of predefined blocks or collection of attributes. Any one of the individual blocks can be replicated and/or stored in a block library for later reuse. However, few if any current block libraries contain or have access to the blocks that enable social inclusion.

An action-based research methodology was used to design, develop and deploy three enabling blocks as part of a plan to develop a larger library of tools for BIM practitioners. The Enabling Block Library is an open access library of Australian code-compliant mobility elements published online. This paper discusses the design and development of the library components in detail, explaining how each of the three blocks was selected in our pilot evaluation and how each was identified; fact-checked; planned (designed); deployed (action); and then evaluated.

The process and evaluation highlights that appropriate code-compliant design tools can support greater social inclusion aspects of a built environment project. These are tools that are relevant to the full spectrum of industry users of BIM, including designers, engineers and certifiers.

Because this paper documents the project while in an early launch phase, with a small number of launch blocks, the research results were limited in their ability to thoroughly measure industry or educational impact. However, the results showed how a socially inclusive BIM block library can be developed and why this is important, with literature supporting the potential of its dissemination to the design and construction industry.

The paper applied action-based research methodology in the development, deployment and evaluation of exploratory BIM use to create more socially inclusive environments. It is of value because it facilitates designers creating the optimum of performance-based accessible environments, rather than the minimum “deemed to satisfy” Building Codes.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the common vaccine equity practices expressed by United States (US) governors in their COVID-19 press conferences—with a specific focus on equitable vaccine distribution and overcoming vaccine hesitancy—in order to provide an understanding of gubernatorial cultural competency during the vaccine administration phase of the pandemic.

This article employs a qualitative content analysis of the COVID-19 press conferences held by US governors from November 1, 2020, to August 14, 2021, to inductively identify themes in socially equitable and culturally competent vaccine administration strategies and rhetoric.

The article finds that common strategies aimed at providing equitable access to vaccines and combating vaccine hesitancy in communities of color include utilizing data to target communities where vaccines are needed, meeting people where they are at by working with community leaders and organizations, addressing language concerns, educating skeptics and appealing to communitarian and familial values. The findings also show that US governors tended to embrace a general prioritization lens rather than focusing on the unique needs of communities of color, with scant attention paid to the historical instances of public health discrimination that have influenced vaccine hesitancy within such communities.

This article provides an understanding of the equitable and culturally competent messages and strategies conveyed by sub-national leaders during the vaccination phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.