International Review of Economics & Finance最新文献

With the global emphasis on sustainability, this research highlights the crucial role Islamic banks can play in sustainable development. The study evaluates how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) practices impact the performance of Islamic banks in GCC countries from 2010 to 2021 using the generalized method of moments (GMM) approach to address potential endogeneity in panel data. Our findings show that while the overall ESG score does not significantly impact bank performance, individual ESG components do. The social component positively affects several performance indicators, governance impacts Return on Equity (ROE), and the environmental factor correlates positively with Tobin's Q. Despite the growing focus on ESG principles, their integration in Islamic banking is limited. By improving ESG performance and offering niche market services, Islamic banks can significantly contribute to sustainability. The study advises bank executives, investors, and policymakers to integrate ESG considerations into business and regulatory strategies to enhance the sector's role in achieving sustainability goals.

This study explores the speed of information absorption in global stock markets using the Damodaran model. Analysing daily stock returns from 2005 to 2015 across 25 countries and 26 indices, the research categorizes markets into major, OECD, and emerging types. Major markets demonstrate the fastest adjustment, achieving a remarkable 1-day speed, followed by OECD markets with a 2–4-day span and emerging markets showing a 2–6-day duration for full information absorption. The results highlight significant mean speed variations across these market categories, offering practical insights for international businesses, corporations, and mutual funds navigating financial transactions globally. This study contributes valuable insights into information absorption speed, emphasizing the hierarchy of major, OECD, and emerging markets based on their speediness. Limitations include the exclusive focus on daily stock returns and the absence of specific diagnostic statistics for the Damodaran model.

Consumption is an important factor driving China's economic growth. Although China's per capita GDP is approaching the threshold of high-income countries, the household consumption rate remains significantly low. One of the main reasons for weak household consumption is the imperfect social security system, and the complementary role of commercial insurance should be fully utilized. Based on existing research, which primarily assesses the positive effects of commercial insurance, this paper focuses on whether commercial insurance can promote household consumption. Using the 2017 and 2019 waves of the China Family Finance Survey (CHFS) data, this paper conducts empirical research with a high-dimensional fixed effects model, performing endogeneity and robustness tests. The results show that commercial insurance has a significant positive effect on household consumption. Mechanism analysis reveals that purchasing commercial insurance significantly reduces households' precautionary savings and liquidity constraints, thereby releasing their purchasing power and ultimately increasing household consumption. The heterogeneity analysis indicates that the promotion effect varies across different regions, household registrations (urban or rural), health statuses, and the marital status of sons in the household. The research findings provide evidential support for the government to further encourage and promote the development of commercial insurance.

This study investigates how party organization embedding affects the share of labor income in enterprises. It looks at party organization embedding from two perspectives: structural embedding and relational embedding. The study finds that party organization embedding boosts the share of labor income, with enterprise greening transformation and financing constraints playing a mediating role. The study's conclusions remain valid even after robustness and endogeneity tests. Additionally, there are differences in the impact of party organization embedding on labor income share across enterprises in different regions. The effect of party organization embedding on labor income share is more significant in the western region, and party organization embedding has a more pronounced impact on labor income share in less market-oriented environments.

Theory posits that financial intermediation (FI) spurs economic growth and supports financial system stability by reducing informational asymmetries and agency problems. Most of this literature focuses on bank lending and has limited success in capturing changes in macroeconomic aggregates. We consider a large set of different financial intermediaries to show that aggregate FI assets contain leading information about real GDP, investment, consumption, industrial production, and unemployment. Bank and shadow bank assets alone contain only limited information about future states of the economy. Overall, FI improves informational efficiency of the markets by providing transparent leading signals of the future economic conditions.

Since the 2008 Financial crisis, macroeconomic and financial markets' stabilisation policies relied mainly on monetary actions, reducing the ECB's margin of manoeuvre and calling for a major role for fiscal authorities. We investigate the impact of government decisions on financial markets for 11 Eurozone economies (from 1995 to 2021), in the very short run, using an event study, finding a positive (negative) reaction to fiscal expansion (consolidation) announcements and in the short/medium-run, with a Bayesian TVP-FAVAR, identifying cross-country heterogeneities; stronger (weaker) public finances show a direct (indirect) relation between fiscal policies and stock prices and an indirect (direct) one with 10-year bond yield.

In this study, we investigate the impact of interest rate liberalization on household investment behavior in China using data from the China Household Finance Survey from 2011 to 2019. We find that financial liberalization significantly increases the likelihood of households participating in financial markets and raises their holdings of riskier assets, driven by the wealth effect. This effect is more pronounced among higher-income, higher-asset, and better-educated households, without housing mortgages, as well as urban households. Our results highlight the importance of financial liberalization policies and provide new perspectives on the “limited participation puzzle” documented in emerging economies, where relatively few households actively invest in financial assets despite high expected returns. This study underscores how interest rate deregulation incentivizes household portfolio reallocation and promotes financial inclusion across socioeconomic groups.

This paper explores the impact of speculation on disparities in home purchase prices within neighborhoods. Using administrative data on residential real estate transactions in Singapore's private housing market, our analysis reveals that housing unit prices increase over time within a neighborhood in the presence of speculators. However, this pattern remains stable after the implementation of macroprudential policies aimed at deterring speculation. Our mechanism analysis indicates that while speculative sales contribute to the increase in the price of neighboring units over time, speculative purchases have negligible effects. These findings underscore the potential of macroprudential policies in mitigating speculation and promoting housing affordability.