Islamic investment funds have become increasingly important because of high demand from many investors, including those outside the Muslim investment community. This article compares the performance and risk sensitivity of Islamic mutual funds in the United States with that of their conventional peers. This article also analyzes the performance of Islamic funds, and compares this performance with that of socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds. Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)-based methodology was used for the analysis. The results suggest that over the entire study period (1987–2018), Islamic funds outperformed conventional funds with comparable characteristics. However, over the most recent period (2000–2018), there were no significant differences in performance. Moreover, Islamic funds achieved levels of adjusted performance that did not significantly differ from those of SRI funds. Conversely, for the earlier period (1987–2000), Islamic funds performed worse than SRI and conventional funds with similar characteristics.

The objective of this study is to analyse volatility transmission between the US and Eurozone stock markets considering the financial market responses to the September 11, March 11 and July 7 terrorist attacks. In order to do this, we use a multivariate GARCH model and take into account the asymmetric volatility phenomenon, the non-synchronous trading problem and the turmoil periods themselves. Moreover, a graphical analysis of the Asymmetric Volatility Impulse-Response Functions (AVIRF) is introduced, which takes into consideration the financial market responses to the terrorist attacks. Results suggest that there is bidirectional and asymmetric volatility transmission and show the different impacts that terrorist attacks had on both markets.

This paper investigates to what extent the substantial increase in exposures of local European equity market returns to global shocks is mainly due to a convergence in cash flows (“economic integration”), to a convergence in discount rates (“financial integration”), or to both. We find that this increased exposure is nearly entirely due to increasing discount-rate betas. This finding is robust to alternative ways of calculating discount-rate and cash-flow shocks.