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This paper aims to contribute to the political connection literature by investigating the impact of political connection on banks’ profitability in Bahrain.

Exploiting the unique natural experiment of the 2017 Qatar blockade crisis, this study uses primary data of political connection. The study uses the difference-in-difference (DID) methodology to investigate the effect of political connections on banks’ profitability.

The main finding is that political connections have a positive effect on bank profitability in Bahrain. The paper finds that the ongoing GCC crisis has had a negative effect on the banking sector of Bahrain. During the Qatar blockade crisis, politically connected banks suffered more than their non-connected counterparts.

The result suggests that the Qatar blockade crisis has had a notable effect on the banking system throughout the region, including both the boycotting countries as well as Qatar. In the banking sector, politically connected banks are the most harmed by the crisis. Investors can enhance their hedging and investment decisions by exploiting knowledge of how political connections affected bank profitability during the Qatar diplomatic crisis and how that effect can be transmitted from one market to another. In addition, regulators could use insights about the association between political connections and profitability in Bahrain to undertake strategies to increase banks’ profitability and mitigate the transmission effect of a crisis by ensuring adequate regulation and supervision.

This paper offers four novel contributions to political connection literature as follows: Firstly, the study fills in an important gap in the literature as it is the first attempt to quantify the impact of political connections on bank performance in Bahrain. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the role of political factors in Bahrain has not been studied about the banking system. Secondly, the study depends on primary data about political connections collected manually from various sources. Thirdly, this is the first study to investigate the effect of the Qatar blockade on the banking sector. Lastly, the evidence suggests that politically connected banks are more profitable than banks that lack political connections. However, the Qatar blockade crisis resulted in a sharp decrease in bank profitability, suggesting that the crisis significantly harmed the banking sector in Bahrain.

This paper aims to ask whether a range of stock market factors contain information that is useful to investors by generating a trading rule based on one-step-ahead forecasts from rolling and recursive regressions.

Using USA data across 3,256 firms, the authors estimate stock returns on a range of factors using both fixed-effects panel and individual regressions. The authors use rolling and recursive approaches to generate time-varying coefficients. Subsequently, the authors generate one-step-ahead forecasts for expected returns, simulate a trading strategy and compare its performance with realised returns.

Results from the panel and individual firm regressions show that an extended Fama-French five-factor model that includes momentum, reversal and quality factors outperform other models. Moreover, rolling based regressions outperform recursive ones in forecasting returns.

The results support notable time-variation in the coefficients on each factor, whilst suggesting that more distant observations, inherent in recursive regressions, do not improve predictive power over more recent observations. Results support the ability of market factors to improve forecast performance over a buy-and-hold strategy.

The results presented here will be of interest to both academics in understanding the dynamics of expected stock returns and investors who seek to improve portfolio performance through highlighting which factors determine stock return movement.

The authors investigate the ability of risk factors to provide accurate forecasts and thus have economic value to investors. The authors conducted a series of moving and expanding window regressions to trace the dynamic movements of the stock returns average response to explanatory factors. The authors use the time-varying parameters to generate one-step-ahead forecasts of expected returns and simulate a trading strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of corporate governance on risk and forward-looking disclosures in Qatar.

The authors automatically measure levels of risk and forward-looking disclosures in the annual reports of Qatari firms for the period 2008–2014. The authors also use two ways clustered error pooled panel regressions to examine the determinants of these disclosures.

The authors find that firms with a higher percentage of foreign ownership disclose more forward-looking information; conversely, board size has a negative impact on the forward-looking disclosure. Financial firms tend to disclose less forward-looking information, however, they tend to disclose more forward-looking information after the 2008 global financial crisis. The authors also find negative relationships between the risk disclosure and both the number of non-executive members of the board of directors and duality role of the CEO.

The study uses the quantity of disclosure as a proxy for the quality of disclosure.

The findings should help the users of corporate annual reports in Qatar to understand managerial incentives for reporting risk and forward-looking information. This should help regulators to set a proper set of disclosure rules. Moreover, this study increases our understanding of the behavior of international investors and the board characteristics (i.e. board size) in motivating risk and forward-looking disclosures in Qatari firms.

The authors provide the original empirical evidence on the impact of corporate ownership and board characteristics on risk and forward-looking disclosures for Qatari firms using two ways clustered error pooled panel regressions.

This paper investigates the effect of political connections on the capital structure of banks before and after the financial crisis in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.

This paper employs the natural experiment that the financial crisis offers and uses a difference-in-differences model to investigate the effect of political connections on capital structure. Capital structure is measured by the total debt to total assets ratio. Control variables include bank size, growth, profitability, coverage ratio and volatility. The research sample includes all the banks in the GCC from 2005 to 2016.

The authors find that political connections negatively affect banks capital structure decisions. The results contradict the claim that politically connected firms tend to sustain higher debt due to government privilege and a lower chance of bankruptcy. Additionally, the results show that after the financial crisis, politically connected banks de-lever more compared to non-connected counterparts. This could suggest that the degree of support received by connected banks changes or that they exploit their retained earnings for financing (individual country results, however, suggest that leverage increases in Qatar).

This paper provides several contributions. First, GCC countries present an interesting and important area in which to study the relation between political connections and capital structure as it represents a mix of newer markets that seek to attract investors and foreign capital. Second, to the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to examine the effect of the political connection and capital structure in GCC region where royal families play a significant role, especially for banks. Third, our paper is the first to link connections with leverage after the financial crisis in the banking sector. Moreover, our paper is the first to investigate this phenomenon in the GCC countries using manually collected primary data.

This paper aims to present a catalogue of the influential aspects resulting from a bibliometric meta-analysis of political connection literature.

This study undertakes a bibliometric meta-analysis review of political connections literature, covering 138 research papers from 2000 to 2020 using the visualization of similarities viewer program.

The authors identify six research groups: the value of political connections; political connections and finance; political connections in banks; political connections and debt; management and political connections; and political connections and governance. This study discusses each stream through a cartographic analysis, including co-authorship, countries and time networks.

This study makes an important and novel contribution to political connection literature. So far, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the only bibliometric study on political connections. This study is the first to use network analysis and community detection to understand social clustering and to identify main research steams in political connection literature.

This chapter provides a comprehensive investigation of the literature on sustainability reporting in Islamic banks using a content analysis of 200 English language articles published between 2000 and 2023. The data were collected from the Web of Science (WOS) database and analyzed using Bibliometrix in R software. This chapter addresses the trends of the most influential authors, institutions, countries, and research hotspots. This chapter fills one of the gaps in sustainability reporting literature, setting up a statistical description of the principal features of sustainable Islamic banking research and carrying out an analysis of its knowledge structure via bibliometric analysis. This chapter found that the number of articles on sustainability reporting in Islamic banks has increased over time; however, it is concentrated on a few core sources and authors, mostly related to Islamic finance, accounting, and ethics, as well as sustainability and social responsibility. The analysis of the co-authorship network shows a limited degree of collaboration between researchers from different clusters. The most productive and collaborative countries are Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan, reflecting their well-developed and regulated Islamic banking industries that follow sustainability guidelines and frameworks. Moreover, the co-word analysis identifies 11 clusters and 43 keywords that represent the main topics and themes in the field, such as corporate governance, performance, disclosure, and risk. This chapter suggests some directions for future research and action on sustainability reporting in Islamic banks. This chapter contributes to the literature on sustainability in Islamic banking and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the economic information content within several popular stock market factors and to the extent to which their movements are both explained by economic variables and can explain future output growth.

Using US stock portfolios from 1964 to 2019, the authors undertake three related exercises: whether a set of common factors contain independent predictive ability for stock returns, what economic and market variables explain movements in the factors and whether stock market factors have predictive power for future output growth.

The results show that several of the considered factors do not contain independent information for stock returns. Further, most of these factors are neither explained by economic conditions nor they provide any predictive power for future output growth. Thus, they appear to contain very little economic content. However, the results suggest that the impact of these factors is more prominent with higher macroeconomic risk (contractionary regime).

The stock market factors are more likely to reflect existing market conditions and exhibit a weaker relation with economic conditions and do not act as a window on future behavior.

Fama and French three-factor model still have better explanations for stock returns and economic information more than any other models.

This paper contributes to the literature by examining whether a selection of factors provides unique information when modelling stock returns data. It also investigates what variables can predict movements in the stock market factors. Third, it examines whether the factors exhibit a link with subsequent economic output. This should establish whether the stock market factors contain useful information for stock returns and the macroeconomy or whether the significance of the factor is a result of chance. The results in this paper should advance our understanding of asset price movement and the links between the macroeconomy and financial markets and, thus, be of interest to academics, investors and policy-makers.

This study aims to synthesise and characterise new reactive dyes based on thiazole derivatives which act as chromophoric moieties. These dyes were applied to cotton fabric, resulting in the dyed fabrics exhibiting good colour strength, light fastness and other fastness properties. The antibacterial activity of the dyed cotton fabric was evaluated against gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria.

The dyes were synthesised in two steps. First, the coupling compound was formed by adding H-acid solution to cyanuric chloride in an ice bath at pH 5 then adding 4-aminobenzenesulphonic acid portion-wise at room temperature and at pH 6-7. Second, different diazonium salts 4-phenylthiazol-2-amine (2a) and 4-(4-methoxyphenyl) thiazol-2-amine (2b) were coupled with the coupling compound at pH 5. The resultant monochlorotriazine (MCT)-reactive dyes (6a, 6b) were formed. The synthesised dyes were applied onto cotton fabric under typical exhaust dyeing conditions and their dyeing properties were investigated.

High antimicrobial activity, dye exhaustion and fixation yield on cotton fabric were recorded for each dye. All dyes showed high stability against washing, rubbing, perspiration and light fastness.

Dyeing of cotton fabric with these dyes which have higher fastness, higher exhaustion and higher antibacterial activity is considered one of the most important reactive dyes species.

The preparation procedure showed the synthesis of the novel MCT-reactive dyes derived from thiazole derivatives followed by the application of these dyes on cotton fabrics.

Use of reactive dyes will bring a number of benefits to society including higher fastness and higher antibacterial activity so, and these dyes can be used for dyeing cotton.

In this work, the new reactive dyes derived from thiazole derivatives were synthesised and their structures were confirmed by the analytical and spectral data. Such compounds are considered to be excellent reactive dyes with different colour shades and higher antibacterial activity.

This paper aims to discuss a comprehensive analysis of the effects of torque and flux hysteresis bands on the inverter average switching frequency considering an induction machine drive under the control of the Takahashi DTC strategy.

The analysis of the effects of torque and flux hysteresis bands on the inverter average switching frequency is carried out taking into account the speed range and the sampling period.

It has been found that the inverter average switching frequency could be more or less taken down according to the speed range and the sampling period by selecting suitable flux and torque hysteresis bands.

This work should be extended by an experimental validation of the established results.

The reduction of the inverter switching frequency is of great importance in direct torque controlled induction motor drive as far as it leads to a decrease of the torque ripple and an increase of the efficiency.

For given torque and flux hysteresis bands, the inverter average switching frequency presents nonlinear shape. Given the fact that the flux switching frequency is a linear function of the speed, one can conclude that the nonlinearity of the inverter average switching frequency is due to the torque switching frequency. This statement has been proven by the introduction of the so‐called focal speeds for the torque switching frequency turns to be null.