Does Faith Matter in Mutual Funds Investing? Evidence from Saudi Arabia

This article investigates one of the most vital issues in the Islamic mutual fund literature: Are there any costs associated with investing in Islamic mutual funds? We used a unique sample of 143 Saudi mutual funds and grouped them into portfolios based on their geographical focus, Shariah compliance, and the Saudi market trend (overall, bull, bear, and the crisis period). Findings suggest there is a benefit from adhering to Shariah law in locally-focused Saudi mutual funds. However, there is a cost of this adherence in internationally-focused Saudi mutual funds. Finally, in Arab-focused Saudi mutual funds, there is neither a cost nor a benefit.     

The Incidence of Public Spending on Healthcare: Comparative Evidence from Asia

The article compares the incidence of public healthcare across11 Asian countries and provinces, testing the dominance of healthcareconcentration curves against an equal distribution and Lorenzcurves and across countries. The analysis reveals that the distributionof public healthcare is prorich in most developing countries.That distribution is avoidable, but a propoor incidence is easierto realize at higher national incomes. The experiences of Malaysia,Sri Lanka, and Thailand suggest that increasing the incidenceof propoor healthcare requires limiting the use of user fees,or protecting the poor effectively from them, and building awide network of health facilities. Economic growth may not onlyrelax the government budget constraint on propoor policies butalso increase propoor incidence indirectly by raising richerindividuals' demand for private sector alternatives.     

An Investigation of Market Orientation (MO) and Tourism Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises’ (SMEs) Performance in Developing Countries: A Review of the Literature

This paper aims to build a structured literature review of the field of market orientation and its impact on tourism small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) performance in developing countries. This literature review will present a comprehensive survey of market orientation (MO) published articles to facilitate good understanding of MO. It serves as an archive and aims to help the scholars and practitioners to explore, analyse, and develop a clear understanding about the different research points and methodologies implemented in previous studies related to MO and its impact on tourism SMEs’ performance. The paper systematically reviews and categorizes the published literature implementing a three-stage methodology, and thereafter analyzes and reviews this literature methodologically. The review covered many areas and identified some factors that drive/hinder market-oriented activities within tourism SMEs. Furthermore, suggestions have been made to understand more thoroughly how market orientation influences tourism SMEs performance in developing economies. A research gap in the area of market orientation and tourism SMEs performance in developing countries was identified. The study provides great benefits for owner-managers, government policy makers, scholars, and educators by clarifying the concept of market orientation and its relationship with performance in the context of tourism SMEs.     

FOREIGN INVESTOR PARTICIPATION IN PRIVATIZATIONS: DOES THE INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT MATTER?

We examine the determinants of foreign investors' participation in the privatization process of developing countries. First, we estimate the probability that foreign investors target privatized firms in a given country. We show that a favorable legal environment where investor protection is higher enhances foreign investors' participation. Foreigners also prefer large, strategic firms from high‐growth economies and socially stable countries with low political risk. Second, we restrict our analysis to privatized firms that foreign investors actually choose and show that the stakes foreigners hold are larger if the firms are privatized by private sales as opposed to public offerings.     

Developing a Website Service Quality Scale: A Confirmatory Factor Analytic Approach

The surge in online consumers and their preference to buy over the Internet is nudging marketers to embrace e-commerce, but mere online presence without distinct user experience may not help attract and retain customers. Research suggests that website service quality is a determining factor in Internet buyer behavior. Several measurement tools have been used in the context of developed economies to measure e-service quality. The very few empirical researches in emerging economies, including India, motivated the researchers in the present study to refine the WEBQUAL 4.0 scale developed by Barnes and Vidgen (2002 Barnes, S. J., and R. T. Vidgen. 2002. An integrative approach to the assessment of e-commerce quality. Journal of Electronic Commerce Research 3 (3):114–27. [Google Scholar]) to measure the service quality at shopping websites. The present study employs tools like SPSS 20.0 and AMOSS 20.0 to analyze the data through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Study results suggest a 14-item WEBQUAL four factor (Ease of Use, Information Quality, Reliability, and Empathy) scale that is appropriate for Indian settings.     

Shareholders versus stakeholders: corporate mission statements and investor returns

This paper seeks to discover whether companies that adopt a stakeholder approach, and thereby demonstrate a wider remit of corporate responsibility, provide inferior returns to those that embrace the shareholder value approach. To classify approaches, mission statements were analysed, the final sample comprising 32 shareholder oriented companies and 48 stakeholder oriented companies. To assess performance both accounting–based and market–based measures were used. A number of moderating variables were taken into account: systematic (beta) risk, gearing (long–term debt to total long–term finance), tax ratios, and firm size. ANOVA and Kruskall–Wallis tests revealed that mission orientation did not affect performance, whether in terms of stock returns or excess returns. Neither were accounting returns on equity different overall, although shareholder oriented companies experienced wider variations in this measure. A number of multiple regressions were also performed. However, the mission dummy was not found to be a significant variable.     

The Monetary Transmission Mechanism, Non-residential Fixed Investment and Housing

We specify a vector autoregression (VAR) model for the U.S. for 1980–2008 to investigate the statistical causal relationships between private non-residential fixed investment, the effective Federal funds rate, personal consumption expenditures, nonfinancial corporate profits, and the nonfinancial corporate credit market debt to test the validity of macroeconomic relationships in a macro model. The VAR utilizes the Toda-Yamamote procedure to test for Granger causality. Our preliminary results show that the transmission mechanism does not work as expected; we find that fixed investment depends on the level of demand in the economy and profits but not on the interest rate. This casts doubt on the usual assumptions about how the monetary transmission mechanism is expected to work. The second part of the paper investigates the effects of the change in the monetary regime towards low and stable interest rates, a policy pursued by the U.S. Fed since the beginning of the 1990s. We find that the new monetary policy regime has the following effects: (1) our VAR model does not support the hypothesis that low interest rates lead to higher fixed nonresidential investment; (2) low interest rates led to a search for higher yields through increasing risk, and (3) they led to an increase in the demand for securitized assets, especially mortgage-backed securities, which eventually resulted in a housing bubble. The overall results therefore raise doubts about the effectiveness of low interest rates as a policy regime designed as a component of a counter-cyclical policy.