This paper investigates the impact of digital technology on the relationship between financialization and income inequality of 54 countries from 2010 to 2015. The results show that financialization and digital technology widen the income inequality gap. Therefore, policies should be centred primarily on eliminating obstacles and developing innovative products that focus on solutions to the low-income consumer problem and those who have been marginalized.

The paper investigates whether unobservable firm-specific effects such as managerial ability is a major component of the target capital structure. We apply the system generalized method of moments that accounts for unobservable firm-specific effects. Our results reveal that unobservable firm-specific effects such as managerial ability are a major component that explains most of the cross-sectional variation in firms’ capital structure in Malaysia.Keywords: Capital Structure; Unobservable Effects; System GMM; Malaysia.

The present study re-examines the impact of financial development on economic growth in resource-rich Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries over 1987-2015. Although several studies investigate the finance-growth nexus, none emphasized the nature of this relationship in MENA. In the long run, an inverted U-shaped association between finance and growth is indicated when using pooled mean group estimations. However, the relationship is not significant in the short run. The outcomes suggest that financial development is significantly and positively affiliated with economic growth up to a certain level. After this turning point, additional financial development tends to adversely affect economic growth. The existence of an inverse U-shape association between financial development and economic growth was confirmed by the estimation of the U-test. The outcomes of our study are important to policymakers, in terms of optimizing the necessary and limit of financial development to ensure maximum benefit for the whole economy through the banking sector.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of foreign aid and FDI

This paper aims to investigate the role of home country institution in affecting outward FDI from Malaysia using data spans from 1980 to 2012.  The model specification is examined in autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing framework.  The empirical evidence reveals that GDP, exchange rate, openness to trade, and corporate tax rate are the key drivers of outward FDI from Malaysia.  This portrays that internationalization strategy of firms is not only relied on home macroeconomic environment, but also home institution.  More importantly, corporate tax rate, as one of the institution factors, is positively related to outward FDI which signifies that high tax rate would prompt local firms to engage in investment abroad as a sign of escape response. This reflects that international expansion appears to be exit strategy from home country instead of entry strategy into foreign markets.  The findings have some important implications on internationalization strategy of firms.