Bibliometric and Scientometric analysis on CSR practices in the banking sector

This paper provides a bibliometric and Scientometric analysis of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) in banking sector. Our study analyzes 551 articles from the Scopus database to find out the relationship between CSR and banking. A bibliometric method was used to visualize the results using R-studio and VOS viewer software. The Scientometric analysis was conducted to determine the findings and mappings of the research themes, directions of current and future research, impact, co-occurrence, co-citations and impact and collaboration trends. We explore how CSR literature has evolved over the years in the banking sector between 1993 and 2021. We find that publication in the CSR and banking domain has increased significantly during 2017 and 2021. Social aspects, board of directors, CSR, environment, competitions, Islamic banking, sustainability, disclosure, ethics, legitimacy theory, sustainable banking, loyalty, and brand equity are the popular research trends and collaboration trends identified. We also provide further scope of the study based on the extensive review of the past literature. Our findings may provide help to future researchers, bankers, and regulators in understanding the current trends and future research progression in the CSR and banking sector.     

Catch Animal Spirits in Auction: Evidence from New Zealand Property Market

Following the animal spirits theory proposed by Akerlof and Shiller, this article contributes to behavior economics by investigating the possibility of using auction sales data to capture evidence of irrational exuberance in the housing market. Using the monthly percentages of residential property auction sales for Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch regions in New Zealand from 2006 to 2015, and the exuberance testing method proposed by Phillips, Shi and Yu, we find that animal spirits have been developing in the Auckland housing market since 2013, but not in other regions. When compared to the results based on price‐to‐rent ratios, auction sales provide more meaningful results for identifying market‐wide irrational exuberance at an early stage. The causality test on price‐to‐rent ratios and auction sales volume shows that asset prices and animal spirits influence each other in the short run. In the long run, prices have significant effect on animal spirits, but not vice versa.     

Does ethics improve stock market resilience in times of instability?

This paper compares the resilience of ethical (Islamic and socially responsible) indexes among five developed (US, UK, Japan, Canada, Australia) and three emerging markets (Brazil, India, South Africa) during the period following the 2008 subprime crisis. It relies on a multivariate CAPM-EGARCH model that accounts for sudden changes in volatility through the application of an iterated cumulative sums of squares (ICSS) algorithm on daily data over the sample period 2008–2014 to model time-varying volatility and ensure reliable estimates. The study confirms the lower systemic risk associated with Islamic indexes during the bearish period and reports that SRI, despite being more subject to systemic risk, offered higher alphas in highly integrated markets, while Islamic indexes performed better in less integrated ones. The evidence also reveals a very limited increase in the models’ predictability power from the integration of sudden changes in volatility into the EGARCH models during the full sample period. This limit is more marked during the bearish sub-period. Our findings have important implications for international investment and portfolio diversification perspectives in times of financial downturn.     

The Performance of Islamic Vs. Conventional Banks: Evidence on the Suitability of the Basel Capital Ratios

This paper examines the effect of various types of bank capital on the profitability and efficiency of conventional and Islamic banks. Our results show that higher quality forms of capital improve the profitability and efficiency for both systems although the results are stronger for conventional banks. The capital effect is more pronounced for large, too-big-to-fail, and highly capitalized banks. The results are robust across various subsamples, alternative profitability and efficiency measures, and different estimation techniques.     

Risk–Return Profiles of Islamic Equities and Commodity Portfolios in Different Market Conditions

Motivated by the recent phenomenal growth in Islamic finance and the financialization of commodities, this study makes an initial attempt to investigate the risk–return profiles of optimized portfolios combining (a) Islamic equities with commodities and (b) conventional equities with commodities during the crises and noncrises periods. The findings tend to indicate that Islamic equity–commodity portfolios provide relatively higher diversification benefits than the conventional equity–commodity portfolios during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis triggered by the financial sector compared to the 2008 global financial crisis triggered by the real housing sector. The findings further suggest that except for a few cases, commodities in general and gold in particular improve diversification benefits.     

Islamic Banking Sustainability: A Review of Literature and Directions for Future Research

This study reviews literature on the Islamic banking sustainability and presents directions for future research. The article discourses scholars’ and practitioners’ views on the two perspectives of sustainability in relation to the objectives of Islamic banking and finance. That there are limited studies on Islamic banking sustainability is one of the major issues presented in the article. The study highlights essential issues on the sustainability without in-depth empirical analysis. The needs for long-term economic, social, and environmental sustainability are not a compromising issue. Therefore, Islamic banks must strike a balance between the institutional, societal, and environmental sustainability in order to achieve the objective of Sharia.     

Profit distribution management by Islamic banks: An empirical investigation

The objective of this paper is to ascertain whether Islamic banks do in fact manage profit distributions and if so, what factors are associated with the extent of profit distribution management. The results suggest that most Islamic banks manage profit distributions, with the extent of profit distribution directly related to religiosity, financial development, asset composition, and existence of discretionary reserves, while it is inversely related to market familiarity with Islamic banking, market concentration, depositor funding reliance and the age of the Islamic bank.     

Sterilisation and Monetary Control by the GCC Member Countries

The prevailing dollar peg of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and the absence of any significant current and capital account restrictions led some to believe that these countries have lost monetary independence. However, the paper presents evidence that interest rates of the GCC countries did not converge to the interest rates of the US implying that the assets of the GCC countries are not perfect substitutes to the US assets. This imperfect asset substitutability has allowed the GCC countries to manoeuvre their monetary policies and the central banks of the GCC countries have had some control over their money growth rates by sterilising the changes in international reserves. Results indicate that the monetary authorities of these countries used domestic credit policy to attain some domestic policy objective while engaging in sterilised foreign exchange intervention. This result implies that the proposed GCC central bank should be able to maintain the monetary independence as a group and can reap the benefit of monetary efficiency of the proposed Gulf Monetary Union.     

Impact of IFRS in New Zealand on Accounts and Earnings Quality

The impact of the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the accounts and the quality of earnings of New Zealand firms is examined. Our analysis of IFRS adjustments for the last period under pre‐IFRS NZ Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) reveals that total assets, total liabilities and net profit were significantly higher under IFRS than under pre‐IFRS GAAP. Profit and equity under IFRS were increased by adjustments for goodwill and other intangibles and investment property, and decreased by adjustments for employee benefits and share‐based payments. Using data for 2002–2009, we find that absolute discretionary accruals were significantly higher under IFRS than under pre‐IFRS NZ GAAP, suggesting lower earnings quality under IFRS than under pre‐IFRS NZ GAAP. However, we find no significant differences in signed discretionary accruals and the ability of earnings to predict one‐year‐ahead cash flows between pre‐IFRS NZ GAAP and IFRS. These results are consistent across alternative measures of accruals quality, sample selection and whether firms elected to adopt IFRS in 2005 rather than comply with them in 2007.