Purpose: This paper aims to examine the effect of insurance specific characteristics, corporate governance and risk reporting attributes, Shari’ah board and inflation rate on the financial performance of Takaful and cooperative insurance industries.Design/methodology/approach: Based on a dynamic panel generalized method of moment’s system estimation, the author investigates determinants of financial performance as measured by the net premium written, earning ratio and profit margin.Findings: Company size, insurance penetration, risk reporting and board size significantly explain the financial performance of both types of insurance companies. The effect of Shari’ah board and capital intensity on the financial performance of Takaful insurance is overall positive. The non-executive directors may negatively affect the financial performance. Additionally, positive relationship was also found between inflation rate and financial performance of cooperative insurance.Research limitations/implications: The typical shortcomings of a content analysis-based research apply to the measurement of operational risk reporting variable. Some modifications need to be made if it were to be used for exploring the financial performance of other Islamic financial institutions. The structural model used in this paper can be used as a generic platform to develop a specific framework for other types of organizations.Practical implications: Some suggestions may be functional for Islamic insurance regulatory authorities to intensify the transparency, and for insurers to channel an additional source of investment funding toward economic sectors.Originality/value: The present study seeks to fill a demanding gap in the literature by providing new empirical evidence on the factors that influence the financial performance of the Islamic insurance sector. Moreover, the paper tries to distinguish and identify the determinants of the performance for Takaful and cooperative insurance companies operating in Saudi Arabia.

The aim of this paper is to measure the efficiency of insurance companies in Saudi Arabia using data envelopment analysis (DEA), to analyse the effectiveness of underwriting processes primarily inputs and outputs are determined. Moreover, this study aims at comparing the efficiency of Takaful and cooperative in the year 2014. Taking into account two main approaches of this technique and considering a sample of 23 insurance companies, we show that the results revealed that insurance companies do not operate efficiently. Also, a classification of companies allows to discover that on average, Takaful insurance are relatively more efficient than cooperative insurance companies. The main finding of this paper is the need for better resource allocation in the cooperative insurance companies’ systems, because some Takaful insurance companies have resource surplus and in other cooperative ones it is observed a lack of resources.

This paper examines the determinants of the dynamic connectedness between sovereign bond yields in a sample of G7 countries. In addition to the common macroeconomic factors, we focus on the impact of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) on the dynamic connectedness patterns between bond yields. To this end, we first examine the full-sample connectedness among the seven bond yields and examine various features of connectedness using a measure recently proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (Int J Forecast 28(1):57-66, 2012). To examine the determinants of the dynamic connectedness, we use the panel data model to consider the dynamic net connectedness between the considered bond yields as the endogenous variable. Overall, being the transmitter or recipient of spillovers appears to have independent and different influences depending on each of the two types of sovereign bond yields. Also, the findings support the idea that EPU can create an environment likely to exacerbate the transmission of spillover shocks between two-year sovereign bond yields. Conversely, on the whole, EPU does not appear to affect the connectedness of thirty-year sovereign bond yields in various bond markets. The findings also reveal the significant impacts of real output on how shocks across countries manifest in different ways.