Mohamed Sherif

This study examines the relative importance of the Shariah-Compliant Dow Jones market indexes to capture the dynamic behavior of stock returns at economy and industry levels. The analysis indicates that ethical investment has only an insignificant influence on the performance of stock market returns for both the economy and industry levels. Further, alternative measures of investment performance including the Carhart and Habit Formation models have been used to examine the behavior of the Shariah-Compliant Dow Jones market indexes. The findings suggest a negative market timing ability with both Islamic and conventional indexes. While Islamic indexes are growth focused, conventional indexes are value focused. Further, when investigating the performance of Islamic and conventional Dow Jones indexes during the recent financial crisis, there is evidence supportive of Islamic indexes against conventional ones. For sector groupings, the results indicate that parameter estimates are not consistent, suggesting that Islamic indexes are sector oriented. These results are explained to be a consequence of less diversification in Islamic indexes, leading to higher risk in some sector groupings such as technology and consumption services

This study examines if the prospectus disclosure of the motives for an initial public offering (IPO) explains the long-run performance of equity issuers using hand-collected data for 245 IPOs from the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET), and also the Market for Alternative Investments (MAI), in the 12-year period between 2001 and 2012. The stock returns of the IPOs were investigated using cumulative abnormal return (CAR) and buy-and-hold abnormal return (BHAR). The authors find a significant impact for the level of use-of-proceeds disclosure on IPO underpricing, and further that the ex-ante uncertainty and signalling hypotheses explain the IPO underpricing phenomenon in the Thai IPO market. Furthermore, Thai firms citing investment needs show significant positive abnormal returns after the offering, but issuers that state general corporate purposes and debt payments motives underperform. The authors provide evidence that the offering size and bull-market conditions significantly affect the IPO pricing and the strategic disclosure of information in the prospectus. Our results are robust, having been subjected to a wide range of sensitivity checks.

Keywords: Prospectus disclosure, IPO performance, Thailand.
JEL Classification: G14, G30, G32

This paper investigates the impact of board diversity and CEO educational background on bank performance. Based on a sample of 54 UK publicly listed banks over the period 2005–2015, we examine the relationship of both static and dynamic modelling frameworks, which controls for individual specific effects and potential sources of endogeneity. The study reports a positive but insignificant relationship between CEO education and bank performance, and a positive significant association between gender diversity and bank performance. It further denotes a negative and significant impact of nationality diversity on bank performance. Our findings provide empirical support for the significance of the association between board diversity and firm performance. Our study also provides support for theories concerned with how corporate governance differs in financial institutions.