EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Is there a diversification “cost” of Shari’ah compliance? Empirical evidence from Malaysian equities

Nazrol K.M. Kamil, Obiyathulla Bacha and Abul Masih

Economic Systems, 2021, vol. 45, issue 1

Abstract: Islamic equity portfolios work with a smaller investment universe given the filtering of non-Shari’ah compliant stocks. It has been theoretically argued that this culminates in suboptimal portfolio diversification, which in turn adversely affects risk-adjusted returns. We offer empirical evidence that such a conceived portfolio diversification “penalty” is far from a foregone conclusion, at least empirically. Our results tend to indicate that Islamic portfolios are not invariably handicapped in terms of portfolio diversification. We also explored dimensions that may account for differences in the relative investment performance between Islamic and conventional portfolios, such as portfolio constraints, short selling and market conditions. We believe this paper is among the first to apply substantial empirical analysis specifically with respect to the portfolio diversification perspective on Islamic equity investments.

Keywords: Islamic equity portfolio; Portfolio diversification; Islamic mutual funds; Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA); Efficient frontier; Maximum sharpe ratio (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C20 C61 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0939362518304217
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Is There A Diversification “Cost” of Shari’ah Compliance? Empirical Evidence from Malaysian Equities (2014) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecosys:v:45:y:2021:i:1:s0939362518304217

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecosys.2020.100817

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Systems is currently edited by R. Frensch

More articles in Economic Systems from Elsevier Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-26
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecosys:v:45:y:2021:i:1:s0939362518304217