In first sixty years of its existence financial sector of Pakistan has experienced two prominent episodes. One, there was an experimentation with the ownership structure of financial institutions which started with promotion of ownership by the private sector and then in 1970s they were nationalized. Subsequently the process was reversed in the 1990s transferring most of the banking assets back to the private sector. Two, on the political front, for long 33 years autocrat have interrupted the democratic order many times. The objective of this study is to take stock of the performance of banking industry when it was in private hands vis-à-vis when banks were nationalized, and, as a supplement, to evaluate the impact of dictatorship versus democracy on the performance of banking industry. Using historical dataset this study offers analysis of banking sector performance by using CAMEL parameters. Our main findings are that when banks are in private hands their profitability is positively related to quality of their assets and management, and it has negative relation with capital adequacy and liquidity. However when banks are under government ownership asset quality and liquidity become irrelevant in determining the profitability whereas capital adequacy, management quality continue to impact bank profitability. This implies that government ownership works like implicit guarantee for banks (a) that they would remain solvent in the short run], and (b) that it would absorb losses emanating from deterioration of bad assets. As regards political regimes the study finds that there is no noticeable difference in the impact of bank specific parameters whether a democratic government is in place or dictatorship is imposed in the country. These findings have implications for bank regulations, monetary policy and for instituting legal reforms in the financial sector.

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This study explored the long and short term effect of interest rate on private sector credit on Pakistan for the period of 1975 to 2011. The Stationary of data was analyzed by Augmented Dickey Fuller and Phillips Peron test. This study applied Auto Regressive Distribution Lag (ARDL) model for the purpose of analyzing long and short term relationship. The results revealed significant negative effect of interest rate on private sector credit in the long run, and also in the short run. The results also indicated significant positive effect of inflation on private sector credit in long and short run. However, exchange rate was found to have no effect on private sector credit.

Using data from Saudi Arabia, a strictly religious society, we examine how Islamic events (i.e., Ramadan, Eid‐ul‐Fitr, Eid‐ul‐Adha and Ashoura) moderate the impact of social mood (positive and negative) on herding in the stock market. We use the cross‐sectional absolute deviation (CSAD) of returns and find that investors' mood during Islamic events of Eid‐ul‐Fitr, Eid‐ul‐Adha and Ashoura significantly affects herding behaviour in the market. Our results, however, contrast with existing evidence of herding in the month of Ramadan. Overall, results are robust after controlling for market conditions (i.e., domestic and US market returns, liquidity, sentiments, and oil price volatility) and crisis events (i.e., global financial crisis and Arab Spring). Though most prior research investigates the impact of individual Islamic events on stocks as seasonal anomalies, our study contributes by jointly exploring how four key Islamic events, associated with contrasting moods, induce diverse herding patterns in the Saudi stock market.

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