The goal of work is to analyze the differences and similarities in the money flows of Islamic (IMF) and conventional mutual funds (CMF) throughout two intense events: the global financial crisis (GFC), and the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemics have been extremely uncommon. Therefore, this work offers novel guide on what effect a global infectious malady can have concerned mutual funds’ flow. The entire sample comprises 87 equity IMFs and 83 equity CMFs in Malaysia, encompassing the two crises from January 2005 to October 2020. This work uses panel regression analysis (fixed-effect and random effect). The main findings are both crises led to a decrease in the money flows for both IMFs and CMFs. The outcomes indicate that viral pandemics effect mutual funds, similar to the earlier financial crises. However, the impact of both crises was less on the flows of IMFs than on the flows of CMFs. The implications of this paper provide managers with an overall view about investors behaviour, especially during extreme events. Thus, it helps them to build their strategies based on the behaviour and preferences of investors. The implication to investors is that it allows investors to decide in directing their money to suitable funds, such as Islamic funds, especially during these extreme periods. This work`s novel contribution is that it’s the first research exploring the effect of the COVID-19 crisis as well as the financial crisis and fund flows in Malaysia.

This study examines how balance-sheet leverage relates to quoted liquidity and equity valuation among Jordanian industrial and service companies. Public Amman Stock Exchange records provide 498 firm-year observations from 76 issuers during 2019–2025. A liquidity subsample comprises 351 observations from 59 issuers and 60,756 valid daily two-sided quotes. Issuer and year fixed-effects models use company-clustered inference, wild-cluster-bootstrap tests and issuer-deletion diagnostics. After size, profitability and share-price adjustment, a ten-percentage-point increase in liabilities/assets is associated with a 0.058 increase in log one-plus-median quoted spread (95% interval: 0.021–0.096; bootstrap p=0.004). The association remains positive across quote-coverage thresholds and issuer deletions. Adding trading activity reduces the estimate to approximately 0.039, with intervals crossing zero; lagged leverage is also inconclusive. The larger valuation sample yields less precise evidence for leverage, while a negative spread–valuation association remains vulnerable to common price scaling and simultaneity. Quote-coverage restrictions exclude less actively traded observations with wider spreads. The findings document a conditional contemporaneous association, not a causal financing effect, and demonstrate the importance of source traceability, price-level adjustment and explicit liquidity-selection diagnostics.