Bangladesh is widely cited as a success story for closing the financial inclusion gender gap through mobile money. We use a November 2021 nationwide survey of 3121 adults, a sample that over-represents men (72.8%) and is, therefore, validated throughout against nationally representative Global Findex microdata, and we combine logistic and ordinal regression, machine learning classification, clustering, and a channel-level decomposition of access. The gender gap in access is almost entirely a mobile money gap. Once education and income are held constant, men and women are equally likely to hold and use formal bank accounts, while men have roughly twice the odds of holding and using a mobile wallet. The pattern replicates in the Findex data, where the mobile money gap holds and the banking gap, present among the least educated, closes with education. A Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition attributes about two-thirds of the composite gap to women’s lower education and income, leaving a residual concentrated in mobile money. Gender appears weak as an aggregate predictor precisely because its effect is channel-specific. Exclusion is sharply concentrated in a segment of women with below-secondary education and no income, but the concentration is additive rather than multiplicative: a main effects model reproduces even the most excluded cell. For policy, closing the gender gap means closing the gap in mobile money adoption, the gap that neither banking-side progress nor education closes.

This paper examines uncovered interest parity (UIP) for the Bangladeshi taka across the 2019–2026 exchange-rate cycle spanning a de facto peg, a disorderly managed depreciation, a crawling peg, and a managed float. Using Bangladesh Bank treasury-auction yields and official exchange-rate data, we estimate the Fama (1984) regression with the interest differential as the regressor. The slope is negative at every horizon, and every specification rejects the UIP null. Maturity-matched slopes are −0.49, −0.58, and −1.10 using 91-day, 182-day, and 364-day bills against matching US Treasury rates; the twelve-month slope using ten-year yields is −1.87. Twenty-nine non-overlapping 91-day bill trades, each held to maturity, lose 9.2 percentage points cumulatively even though 65% are profitable, a pattern consistent with a realised peso event in which managed exchange rates delayed and concentrated currency adjustment. Balance-of-payments data corroborate this view: foreign holdings of Bangladeshi government debt fell 53% between 2020 and 2026 as the differential widened, and the differential does not predict later foreign inflows. We read the persistent differential as consistent with institutional frictions: binding capital controls, the absence of a forward market, and domestic financial segmentation. We cannot, however, separate control from inflation, term, liquidity, and country-risk premia, and a reserve-inclusive pressure measure does not detect the intervention channel. A descriptive ten-country comparison shows negative slopes in nine currencies; inflation controls halve that association. The contribution is a documented account of parity across a full managed-exchange-rate cycle in a frontier economy, together with the quantity evidence constraining how it can be explained.

We introduce the first fully operational Islamic Credit Default Swap (iCDS) on public blockchain infrastructure, combining a closed-form riba-free pricing formula with a deployed smart contract on Arbitrum. Building on the κ-rate framework of Ackerer, Hugonnier & Jermann [1] and the credit-equivalence theorem of Ahmed, Bhuyan & Islam [3], the fair iCDS spread is s * = κ(1-δ) at ι = 0, where κ is the convergence intensity and δ is the recovery rate. Conventional CDS, discounted at the risk-free rate ι, prices at s conv = κ(1-δ) • ι/(κ+ι) < s *. The difference κ 2 (1-δ)/(κ + ι) is the riba premium-the credit protection value that the conventional market underprices by discounting future default losses at ι. Using a 1,176-observation panel of sovereign spreads across seven OIC-member countries from 2012 to 2025, we show that (i) the AHJ formula at ι=SOFR fits investment-grade GCC sovereign CDS spreads within 7.7% mean absolute error at 2025 rates, and (ii) the mean riba premium is 109 bps across all country-periods and 63.7 bps for investment-grade sovereigns. The iCDS smart contract (iCDS.sol), deployed at 0xc4E8907...c16c5 on Arbitrum Sepolia, implements the full open → accept → settle lifecycle at a cost of $0.14 for a one-year protection with three premium payments. We conduct a six-jurisdiction legal analysis identifying UAE/VARA and Bahrain/CBB as the most permissive pilot frameworks, and design a governance-token liquidity-bootstrapping mechanism with a Nash-equilibrium participation guarantee.

Islamic fixed-income markets lack a riba-free term structure of rates analogous to the risk-free yield curve used in conventional credit pricing. We address this gap by constructing the first empirical κ-yield curve from sovereign sukuk spread data. The convergence intensity κ was introduced by Ackerer, Hugonnier and Jermann [1] and shown by Ahmed, Bhuyan and Islam [2] to be the riba-free analogue of the risk-free rate in Islamic credit pricing: the point estimator κ = s/(1-δ) connects the observed sukuk spread s to the recovery rate δ without any interest-bearing component. Using a panel of 8,232 monthly observations across seven GCC and Southeast Asian sovereign markets spanning January 2012 to December 2025, we fit Nelson-Siegel-Svensson (NSS) curves to cross-sectional κ estimates at maturities of 2 to 20 years. The resulting κyield curves are upward-sloping for all seven countries, confirming the term-premium effect in an interest-free setting. Panel root-mean-square errors range from 4.62 bps (UAE) to 28.46 bps (Bahrain), reflecting underlying credit-quality differences that the NSS functional form captures. A horse race shows that a SOFR-based model leaves 13.4% of spread variation unexplained relative to the κ structural benchmark. GMM estimation of Cox-Ingersoll-Ross dynamics confirms mean-reverting κ with half-lives of 9-13 months and the Feller non-negativity condition satisfied in all seven markets. The κ-yield curve provides a theoretically sound, Shariah-compliant substitute for conventional risk-free curves in sukuk pricing, Islamic monetary policy analysis and halal derivatives valuation.

Contemporary Shariah-compliant financial engineering defends the exclusion of interest almost entirely through twentieth- and twenty-first-century institutional economists, framing it as a regulatory adjustment to fractional-reserve banking. This paper recovers a deeper and older foundation. Drawing on al-Ghazali's teleology of money as a "mirror," Ibn Taymiyyah's conception of money as an immutable measure (mi'yar al-amwal), Ibn Khaldun's labour theory of value, and al-Maqrizi's account of currency competition, it argues that the prohibition of riba follows by construction from a classical ontology of what money is, and that a riba-free pricing primitive—the convergence intensity κ, which a purpose-built blockchain substrate is designed to enforce at the consensus level—is the mechanical instantiation of that ontology rather than a modern compromise with it. The contribution is conceptual: it supplies the κ-program its missing foundation and grounds, in named classical authority, claims its companion papers currently assert without one. Throughout, the substrate is said to operationalize classical principles; we do not claim the classical authors endorsed distributed consensus.

Purpose — This paper investigates whether perpetual futures can satisfy Islamic prohibitions on riba (interest), gharar (uncertainty), and maysir (speculation) — a question unaddressed by prior literature. Design/methodology/approach — The study develops a four-category taxonomy of perpetual futures by funding-formula structure, collects 39,406 unique funding-rate intervals across four platforms over 365 days (February 2025 – February 2026), and analyses a cross-platform comparison — with a placebo design — between interest-bearing and interest-free DEX protocols. Shariah analysis applies El-Gamal's riba conditions, Kamali's standardisation criterion, and Salamon's maysir test. Findings — The interest parameter in CEX funding formulas is mathematically unnecessary. dYdX v4 operates with I = 0 and produces a funding distribution distinct from CEX platforms (Cohen's d = 0.782 at native cadence, 0.703 cadence-matched; Kolmogorov-Smirnov D = 0.506). Hyperliquid — a DEX using the CEX formula — clusters with CEX. Formula structure rather than exchange architecture governs the riba dimension of the Shariah classification. Originality/value — The first empirically validated framework demonstrating that the riba component of perpetual futures funding is structurally removable, correcting an error of extrapolation in Islamic finance scholarship that treated a single CEX implementation as representative of the entire instrument class. Ownership (qabdh) and delivery-intent are scoped as open questions for cash-settled synthetic perpetuals. Research limitations/implications — The empirical sample covers a single 365-day period; extension to additional time windows would strengthen external validity. Practical implications — The taxonomy provides a screening tool for Shariah boards, fund managers, and exchange designers evaluating Shariah-compliant perpetual futures instruments.