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This paper aims to examine the determinants that influence bank users’ acceptance for Islamic financial technology (FinTech) services by extending the technology acceptance model (TAM) in the Malaysian context.

The survey was conducted using convenience sampling. Moreover, 205 responses were gathered from users of the Islamic bank. On the same note, the literature on determinants of Islamic FinTech acceptance and TAM was reviewed as well in a bid to contribute to the factors that are instrumental in determining the acceptance of FinTech services.

Findings of the study reveal that Islamic FinTech’s services acceptance is determined by perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and also by another variable, which is consumer innovativeness (CI). On the contrary other factors, self-efficacy and subjective norms are found not to be influential in determining Islamic FinTech’s acceptance by Islamic banking users.

TAM is extended in the context of Islamic FinTech. A new variable, namely, CI is tested using TAM. CI is yet to be tested, therefore, this paper will be a useful reference for the policymakers, academicians and future researchers.

Employees are driven and motivated to exercise knowledge-based resources as a result of leadership. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of authentic leadership on organizational commitment and tacit and explicit knowledge-sharing behaviors in Saudi non-profit organizations (NPOs). The study also aims to explore authentic leadership’s direct and indirect impact on tacit and explicit knowledge-sharing behaviors via organizational commitment.

The study used a quantitative research design by distributing a survey questionnaire among 415 employees. A total of 300 responses were collected during the survey questionnaire data collection.

The results showed that authentic leadership significantly and positively influenced organizational commitment and tacit and explicit knowledge sharing. Additionally, organizational commitment significantly and positively mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and tacit knowledge sharing, and there was partial mediation. However, organizational commitment failed to mediate the relationship between authentic leadership and explicit knowledge sharing.

The management of Saudi NPOs should focus on developing knowledge capital resources for employees who work in an organization to get a competitive advantage.

The study made a novel contribution that the Saudi NPOs should promote tacit and explicit knowledge-sharing but focus more on explicit knowledge sharing.

This study aims to explore the connections between intellectual capital and academic performance in Lahore, Pakistan’s higher education institutions (HEIs). The research delves into the mediation effect of dynamic capabilities, such as acquisition and exploitation, between intellectual capital and innovation within these educational institutions.

Grounded in the insights from a comprehensive literature review, the methodology uses a pre-tested questionnaire. Faculty members from private universities in Pakistan were chosen as the study's unit of analysis. Using a convenience sampling technique, data was gathered from 342 teachers and then analyzed using Smart (PLS) 3.3.3.

The results demonstrate that intellectual capital positively affects innovation. Acquisition and exploitation further mediate this influence, improving academic performance. Applying the knowledge-based view theory, the study confirmed the significance of all the posited hypotheses, underlining the positive interrelationships within Pakistan’s academic institutions.

The novelty of this research lies in its specific focus on the HEIs in Pakistan, demonstrating how intellectual capital and dynamic capabilities foster innovation, thereby enabling these institutions to maintain a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving educational landscape.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between trade and economic growth using data of UAE economy for the period of 1974-2011.

The bounds testing is applied for testing the cointegration relationship between the variables. The rolling window approach has been used to analyze the stability of long run coefficients.

The empirical analysis shows the presence of cointegration between trade and economic growth. Furthermore, exports have positive, but imports have negative effect on economic growth. The rolling window approach confirms the stability of long-run estimates.

This paper provides new insights for policymakers to use trade as economic tool for sustainable economic development.

This paper makes a unique contribution to the literature with reference to UAE, being a pioneering attempt to investigate the relationship between trade and economic growth by using long time series data and applying more rigorous techniques like time varying rolling window analysis.

Branding plays a vital role in the success of every organization and even industry. In Islamic countries, every organization must consider Sharia rules while strategy making. Nowadays, the supply chain is considered a major tool of branding and marketing. After an extensive literature review, it has been found that the studies that test the marketing advantages (MAs) and sustainable competitiveness through branding are scarce. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the relationship between branding and MAs and mediating the role of sustainable competitiveness.

This is a quantitative study. An instrument was adopted, and data were collected. The researchers tested the hypotheses from the survey data from 179 electronic organizations. The data ware analyzed through structural equation modeling to examine the proposed hypothesis of this study.

The findings indicate that the relationship among dimensions of branding attitude and MAs were supported (expect reliability). Additionally, this study also revealed that a sustainable competitive variable plays a substantial role as a mediating variable in those relationships.

This study is a cross-sectional survey. Consequently, the limited sample size from the electric industry may affect the power of generalizability. The next study may be demonstrated for other industries to respect the nature of the branding and MAs among the managerial staff of other industries.

This study will help managers to understand how to use the supply chain as branding for their MAs through sustainable competitiveness.

This study adds practical value to the literature on sustainable competitive, branding and MA and supply chain. The study shows that sustainable competitiveness has varying mediating effects on industry value.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of the empirical literature on environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) estimation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions over the period of 1991–2017.

This survey categorizes the studies on the basis of power of income in empirical models of EKC. It has been hypothesized that the EKC shows an inverted U-shaped association between economic growth and CO₂ emissions.

For all the contexts, the results of EKC estimation for CO₂ emissions are inconclusive in nature. The reasons behind this discrepancy can be attributed to the choice of contexts, time period, explanatory variables, and methodological adaptation.

The future studies in this context should not only consider new set of variables (e.g. corruption index, social indicators, political scenario, energy research and development expenditures, foreign capital inflows, happiness, population education structure, public investment toward alternate energy exploration, etc.), but also the data set should be refined, so that the EKC estimation issues raised by Stern (2004) can be addressed.

By far, no study in the literature of ecological economics has focused on the empirical estimation of EKC for CO₂ emissions. This particular context has been used for this study, as CO₂ is one of the highest studied pollutants in the ecological economics, and especially within the EKC hypothesis framework.

Every year, hundreds of people have died and thousands have been injured because of insufficient management of well control at oil and gas drilling and production sites. Major causes which have been reported in previous studies included uncontrollable blowouts and failure of blowout preventers because of insufficient safety practices. These onshore and offshore blowout disasters not only harm the work force but also critically affect the environment and marine life. In this research paper, a detailed quantitative survey and qualitative risk assessments (RA) have been carried out for assessing the potentially hazardous activities associated with well control along with their appropriate controls and risk reduction factors and mitigating measures in Middle East and south East Asian countries.

The sequential explanatory research design has been adopted in this study. Whereas, descriptive statistical approach has been used for the quantitative data analysis of this study. While, in-depth interview approach has been used for qualitative data collection. Similarly, what-if analysis method has been adopted in this study for the identification of effective safety and health risk mitigating factors because it provides in-depth information from health and safety environment experts.

The cumulative quantitative results based on the response from Saudi Arabian drilling industry have indicated that the well control operation is highly hazardous then Malaysian and Pakistani oil and gas industries. Likewise, findings from what-if analysis approach demonstrate that the drilling crewmembers have repetitively faced life threatening hazards which occur (safety and chemical) during well control onshore and offshore operation because of oil base mud, confined space at site, pinch points and falling during working on blow out preventers. According to the overall result, respondents have highly recommended engineering and administrative hazard controlling factors as most suitable for the elimination of safety and chemical hazards during well control activities.

Besides, the developed methodological framework for the identification of suitable hazard controls can also be effectively used for potential hazards reorganization and identification of suitable hazard controls for other drilling and production industries and regions for accident prevention and safety and health management.

This is a first comparative research study which has been carried out in Malaysian, Saudi Arabian and Pakistani onshore and offshore oil and gas industries for well control health and safety management and reorganization of most effective hazards mitigating factors at drilling sites.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of base lending rate (BLR), consumer prices, gross domestic product, money supply (M₃), Karachi stock exchange composite index, KIBOR, and profit rate of Islamic banks on deposits of both conventional and Islamic banks in Pakistan.

Quarterly data of six years (2006-2011) are obtained from 30 banks, consisting of 25 conventional and five Islamic banks. The short-run as well as long-run relationships among these variables are examined by utilizing advanced time series approach. Bounds testing and autoregressive distributed lag have been used to examine cointegration and error correction framework for short-run dynamics.

The empirical results reveal that variables such as interest rate of conventional banks, profit of Islamic banks, consumer prices, M₃, and BLR have different impact on conventional and Islamic bank deposits. Depositors of conventional and Islamic banks are sensitive to the returns received on deposits. A boost in interest rate increases the deposits of conventional banks but decreases those of Islamic banks.

This study signifies that customers of Islamic banks are motivated by profit. This indicates the normal behavior of customers, hence endures the substitution effect in conventional system. The study has important implications for Islamic banks to offer more competitive rates of profit with respect to the interest rate of conventional banks in order to collect more deposits. It also identifies relevant policy implication for the central bank of the country.

Over the last couple of years, the Chinese manufacturing sector was affected by the onset of the US–China trade war and the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In such a scenario air quality in China has encountered a shock, and the impacts of these two incidents are unknown. In this study, the authors analyze the convergence of air quality in China in the presence of multiple structural breaks and how the impacts of these two events are different from each other.

In order to assess the nature of shocks in the presence of multiple structural breaks, unit root tests with multiple structural breaks are employed.

The results reveal that air quality in China is showing the sign of convergence, and it is consistent across 18 provinces which are worst hit by the outbreak of COVID-19. In the presence of transitory shocks, the impact of COVID-19 outbreak is found to be higher, whereas the impact of the US–China trade war is found to be more persistent. Lastly, the outbreak of COVID-19 has been found to have more impact on pollutants with higher severity of health hazard.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that contributes to the empirical literature in terms of investigating the convergence of overall air pollution and individual air pollutants taking COVID-19 and the trade war into account.