No abstract

During periods of market stress, risk-averse investors reallocate their investments from stocks to gold in a bid to hedge risks. Market participants interpret the induced gold price increase as an indication of safe-haven purchases and a signal of increased uncertainty in the general economic and financial conditions, thereby causing higher gold price volatility. The aim of this paper is to analyze whether this flight to safety effect can be observed during the COVID-19 crisis, which is considered to be a one-of-a-kind crisis and obviously of different origin compared to previous (financial) crises. By examining the interactions between the (option-implied) volatilities of the stock market (VIX) and of the gold (GVZ) and oil (OVX) markets, the main findings indicate that there is a granger causality in general between the equity market and the gold as well as the oil market. During the COVID-19 crisis, a stronger influence of the equity market on the oil market can be observed. Based on symmetric causality tests that are typically employed in the literature, this cannot be observed for the gold market. However, once we control for asymmetric causal interactions, we find that positive shocks in VIX cause positive shocks in GVZ. Hence, the typical flight to safety effect, similar to the one observed during other (financial) crises can also be identified for the COVID-19 crisis. The causality between the equity and oil market is triggered by political factors as well as the economic impact of the crisis which induces a sharp drop in demand for oil.

This chapter measures the effect of growth in Islamic Banking assets on economic performance in a sample of 32 developed and developing countries based on data for the period 2000-2017. The findings show that, although Islamic banks are considered small relative to the total size of the financial sector, these are positively correlated with economic growth even after controlling for financial structure, macroeconomic factors and other variables. The outcome is robust across different econometric specifications like pooling OLS, fixed effects, and panel data with over-identified GMM. The results are confirmed on two different indicators of Islamic banking and hold for different periods. Empirical findings confirm theoretical expectations that although Islamic banking still represents a relatively very small share of the financial system, it is growing and generating an economic boost to ensure a stable banking industry.

No abstract

No abstract