Does it pay to be a faithful investor? A risk-based approach performance analysis of Islamic funds vs UCITS schemes

PurposeThis paper empirically investigates the performance of Islamic funds, which have been praised for weathering the 2008 financial storm relatively well and compares it to a European product designed to protect the most vulnerable of investors, UCITS funds.Design/methodology/approachThis paper builds on 128 time-series regressions using various factor models to analyse the risk-return relationship of 242 Islamic and UCITS funds relative to a market benchmark, over a 10-year period starting January 2006, to capture severe bear and bull market conditions.FindingsIslamic funds do not face a competitive disadvantage arising from their strict compliance with Shariah principles, and their performance and investment style is relatively similar to UCITS schemes.Practical implicationsIslamic funds represent a low risk investment due to their very mild betas. Therefore, when forming part of a diversified portfolio, they can act as a hedging tool against adverse market movements.Social implicationsMuslim investors are not punished relative to conventional retail investors when following their own beliefs. Other investors can consider Islamic funds in their portfolio allocation, especially those who seek socially and ethically responsible investments.Originality/valueThis paper fills a lacuna in the existing literature, because the sample is made up of Islamic funds established worldwide and includes not only equity, but also fixed income and mixed allocation funds.

The Practicality of Adopting Blockchain-Based Distributed Identity Management in Organisations: A Meta-Synthesis

Blockchain has become an irresistible disruptive technology with the potential to innovate businesses. Ignoring it may in itself result in a competitive disadvantage for organisations. Except for its original financial application of cryptocurrency, more applications are being proposed, the most common being supply chain management and e-voting systems. However, less focus is made on information and cybersecurity applications of blockchain, especially from the enterprise perspective. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by exploring blockchain as a use case for identity management in the context of an organisation. The paper gives a comprehensive background aiming at understanding the topic, including understanding whether claims made around it, especially blockchain’s potential to address identity management challenges, are based on facts or just a result of hype. Meta-synthesis was used as a research methodology to summarise the 69 papers selected qualitatively from reputed academic sources. The general trend shows theoretical evidence supporting some of the claims made but not necessarily friendly to the enterprise context. The study reveals a promising but immature state of blockchain, consequently questioning whether adopting blockchain-based distributed identity management in organisations is fully practical. A research model called TOE-BDIDM is proposed to guide further investigation.

A Game-Theoretic Model of Strategic Interaction Using Advertising: Simulating the Evolution of the Cournot Nash Equilibrium under Different Competitive Scenarios

This paper examines the behaviour of two firms competing in a duopoly, where firms can influence demand through use of advertising. The paper simulates the strategic interaction of the two firms based on a game-theoretic Cournot analytical model. The evolution over time of the Nash equilibrium is graphically displayed for a number of different competitive scenarios. The results show that there exist threshold levels of advertising effectiveness at which duopoly behaviour bifurcates, that perfectly cooperative advertising can lead to competitive disadvantage, and that perfectly predatory advertising can lead to stagnation or losses.

Leader Dismissal or Continuity, President Longevity, Geographic Orientation of Owners and Team Performance: Insights from French Men’s Football, 1994–2016

We investigated the impacts of president longevity and the geographic orientation of owners on team performance and on the effectiveness of dismissing the leader. In addition, we considered their impacts on the effectiveness of not dismissing the leader while the same organisation fires them at another time for a similar performance. We also tested the impact of dismissing the leader or not on performance. We explored the aforementioned risk-taking relationships in the first tier of French men’s football over the 1994–2016 period (n = 4918 observations). To do so, we used a counterfactual based on the evolution of the team position over the last three games leading to the leader change and estimate linear regression models with fixed team effects. Our findings show that performance improves either after a leader dismissal or not in the same situation, and both president longevity and the geographic orientation of owners impact the effectiveness of dismissing the leader or not. In particular, global- and local-oriented ownerships have a positive impact on the effectiveness of the decision to dismiss the leader or not compared to national-oriented ownership. Practical implications stem from the research, e.g., how organisations with national-oriented ownership can overcome their competitive disadvantage.

IS FOREIGNNESS A SOURCE OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN THE BRAZILIAN PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY?

During the first decade of the 21st century, the accelerated growth of the pharmaceutical market in Brazil attracted investments from multinational pharmaceutical companies. National companies followed this investment trend, and the industry matured, and competition intensified. However, companies that operate in a foreign, new environment, driven by unfamiliar competitive forces encounter additional costs to operate. Using data from 2011 to 2016, this study employs panel data methodology with fixed effects using a sample of twenty-two pharmaceutical companies, eleven Brazilian subsidiaries of multinationals and eleven national companies, with the objective to investigate whether foreign companies operating in Brazil incur a liability of foreignness (LOF), which refers to these additional operating costs. This study contributes to the literature by evaluating the impact of Liability of Foreignness on working capital and profitability in the pharmaceutical sector. Our findings suggest that MNEs have a competitive disadvantage in inventory management compared to local companies.

Text and Data Mining Exception in South America: A Way to Foster AI Development in the Region

In 2015, authors wondered if Europe was falling behind in the artificial intelligence (AI) race because of the lack of a text and data mining (TDM) exception. What can then be said for South America? Copyright regimes and their interaction with the development of digital technologies in this continent have been overlooked by authors. This paper intends to start filling this gap by mapping the current state of copyright exceptions that serve computational analysis in South America. After reviewing the copyright regimes of the five largest economies of the region (i.e. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru), I concluded that they are not prepared for digital research techniques such as text and data mining. Researchers in these countries are at a competitive disadvantage, as rigid and outdated copyright regimes act as a constraint against keeping pace with the latest developments in subsequent years. If policymakers want to develop their nations’ AI capabilities, as many governments and international organizations claim they do, they will need to look for a more flexible and enabling approach to copyright.

Introduction: Taiwan as Epistemic Challenger

Four articles are included in this topical section on ‘Taiwan as Epistemic Challenger’. Two of the four contributions were originally presented at the 3rd World Congress of Taiwan Studies held on 6–8 September 2018 at Academia Sinica in Taipei. The main theme of this Congress was ‘Taiwan in the Globalized World: The Relevance of Taiwan Studies to the Social Sciences and Humanities’. The other two contributions were accepted through a call for papers. The topical section aims to demonstrate that Taiwanese scholars and foreign researchers of Taiwanese society can transcend the competitive disadvantage of studying a single country and make Taiwan visible in international scholarship. The findings of relevant Taiwan studies research can instead modify the epistemic assumptions and methodology in different disciplines of the social sciences and humanities.

Revealed Comparative Advantages and Exports Competitiveness of Asean-5 Countries in the Global Market

This study aims at measuring the comparative advantage and competitiveness of the ASEAN-5 (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) economies in the world market. The current study employed four indices of Revealed Comparative Advantage namely Revealed Comparative Advantage index (RCA), LnRCA, Vollrath index (RCA#) and Revealed Symmetric Comparative Advantage index (RSCA). The data for the analysis has been taken from International trade center UN-COMTRADE statistics for the exports of electrical machinery for these selected economies from 2003-2020. The findings of the analysis portray that Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand had a comparative and competitive advantage, while Indonesia had a comparative and competitive disadvantage in the electrical machinery in the global economy. This study will be helpful for the policy makers to boost human capital formation and to increase technology transfer and innovation to enhance the competitiveness and comparative advantage.

Reduced visitation to the buzz-pollinated Cyanella hyacinthoides in the presence of other pollen sources in the hyperdiverse Cape Floristic Region

Many plant species have floral morphologies that restrict access to floral resources, such as pollen or nectar, and only a subset of floral visitors can perform the complex handling behaviours required to extract restricted resources. Due to the time and energy required to extract resources from morphologically complex flowers, these plant species potentially compete for pollinators with co-flowering plants that have more easily accessible resources. A widespread floral mechanism restricting access to pollen is the presence of tubular anthers that open through small pores or slits (poricidal anthers). Some bees have evolved the capacity to remove pollen from poricidal anthers using vibrations, giving rise to the phenomenon of buzz-pollination. These bee vibrations that are produced for pollen extraction are presumably energetically costly, and to date, few studies have investigated whether buzz-pollinated flowers may be at a disadvantage when competing for pollinators' attention with plant species that present unrestricted pollen resources. Here, we studied Cyanella hyacinthoides (Tecophilaeaceae), a geophyte with poricidal anthers in the hyperdiverse Cape Floristic Region of South Africa, to assess how the composition and relative abundance of flowers with easily accessible pollen affect bee visitation to a buzz-pollinated plant. We found that the number of pollinator species was not influenced by community composition. However, visitation rates to C. hyacinthoides were negatively related to the abundance of flowers with more accessible resources. Visitation rates were strongly associated with petal colour, showing that flower colour is important in mediating these interactions. We conclude that buzz-pollinated plants might be at a competitive disadvantage when many easily accessible pollen sources are available, particularly when competitor species share its floral signals.