Monday, March 25, 2019

Causality among Stock Market and Macroeconomic Factors: A Comparison of Conventional and Islamic Stocks

By: Muhammad Hanif & Arshad Ali Bhatti

A recent development in financial markets is the creation of Shar¯ı‘ah compliant stock universes. Shar¯ı‘ah compliant stock universe is featured as socially responsible investments, less levered, and more reflective of the real sector. This study is conducted to understand and document the short-run equilibrium among important macroeconomic indicators and Equity indexesIslamic and conventional in the post-Shar¯ı‘ah-screening era in Pakistan. Comparative study of linkages among stock indexes and macroeconomic variables is of great interest to i) identify the important macroeconomic factors; and ii) document whether Shar¯ı‘ah screening of stocks has created any difference (in macro risk factors). We have included eight macroeconomic variables to study integration with stocks for 64 Months’ period (07/2011-10/2016). Evidence has been obtained by application of correlation, unit root, OLS-regression and Granger causality tests. Findings suggest that both markets Islamic & conventional are integrated with selected macroeconomic indicators. However, evidence lacks the integration of markets themselves. We identify a set of two variables from real economy exports and workers’ remittances-linked with both markets, while the third variable is different for Islamic (industrial production) and conventional (Money Supply (MS)) markets. Important monetary variables interest rate and inflation have shown an insignificant association. Movements of Islamic index are in-line with the theory i.e., disassociation from interest and reflection of the real economy. Movements of conventional index cover both real and monetary sectors.

Sunday, March 24, 2019

Do power sector reforms affect electricity prices in selected Asian countries?

By: Tauqir Ahmed & Arshad Ali Bhatti

This paper examines the impact of power sector reforms on electricity prices using panel data for selected Asian countries over the period 1970–2017. We estimate two separate models for domestic and industrial prices. Our results from pooled OLS and the random effect model show that the impact of independent power producers, privatisation, restructuring, and deregulation on electricity prices is negative and significant, making both domestic and industrial consumers better off. However, the welfare effects of unbundling generation from transmission and distribution appear to be beneficial for residential end-users only. Our results also indicate that other reform indicators including third-party access and the existence of independent regulatory agencies may not be the right choice for a reduction in electricity prices, given the absence of a requisite conducive environment for regulations in our sample countries. Thus, the inconsistent behaviour of different regulatory reforms towards different countries and regions of the world needs to be considered in the policy formulation of the power sector. We also note that the results can be magnified in terms of significance with the exclusion of some outlier observations in the data.

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