Ariful Hoque

This study quantifies the influence of FinTech, particularly Neo-banking, on inclusive finance, with a focus on how Neobanking as FinTech innovation bridges the financial exclusion gap. We employ Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Quantile Regressions using data across 72 countries from 2017 to 2022. This study also extends empirical experiments to time-fixed effects and Three-Stage Least Squares (3SLS) regressions to address endogeneity and show the robustness of the experiment. We find that Neo-banking has a significantly positive impact on inclusive finance, particularly in encouraging traditional access to finance adoption and inspiring borrowing from traditional banking. Besides, the institutional quality is also significantly fostering inclusive finance. Overall, the output indicates that Neobanking has the ability to reduce the financial exclusion gap by reaching underprivileged communities in isolated or rural locations where there might not be many conventional physical bank branches.

We examine the factors associated with the establishment of an environmental committee at the board level and its impact on the disclosure of environmental risks in an Australian context. Using a sample of Australian Stock Exchange firms disclosing their information to the Carbon Disclosure Project, we document a strong association between the existence of environmental committee and board independence, CEO duality, directors’ share ownership, and institutional shareholding. Firms that belong to environmentally sensitive industries are more likely to have environmental committees. Furthermore, we find that firms with environmental committees are more likely to disclose environmental risk information and this leads to mitigation in information asymmetry between managers and stakeholders.

This study examines the possibility of using widely known implied volatility (IV), realized volatility (RV) and GARCH volatility (GV) as input for Merton (1973) version Black-Scholes (1973) (M-BS) options pricing model. Since the construction method, information obtaining procedure, information containing characteristic and prediction capability of IV, RV, GV are distinct, the purpose of this study is to analyse which volatility information content is appropriate for pricing currency options correctly and which one incorporate relevant market information for the accurate currency options price forecast. The accuracy of options price is crucial for managing financial risk, speculative purposes and preventing the abnormal arbitrage profit.

Countries in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) have diverse economic structures. Some countries are oil exporters, some are oil importers and some countries are very poor dependent on agriculture. Since current account is an important indicator of an economy‟s health, it is of interest to examine if current account balances in MEA region are sustainable. However, empirical research paid scant attention to this issue. No study has been conducted before to examine this issue. The present paper makes an attempt to fill this research gap by employing panel data model over the period from 1995 to 2014 to examine current account sustainability in MEA countries. We follow intertemporal budget constraint approach and examine long-run relationship between export and import plus interest on net foreign debt. As we work with panel data, we pay special attention to cross-section dependence. We use annual data collected from World Development Indicators. All data (exports, imports and interest on long-term external borrowing) are in current US dollar and expressed as percentage of GDP. Interest payment on long-term external borrowing (also in current US dollar) is used as a proxy for interest on net foreign debt. Panel unit root test to cross-section dependence indicate variables are first-difference stationary. We next use panel cointegration and bootstrap critical values under null hypothesis to accommodate cross-section dependence. Panel cointegration result suggests that current account is sustainable. However, panel cointegrating regression estimation indicates that the value of sustainability coefficient is less than 1 (one), which implies that current account is weakly sustainable. As current account is weakly sustainable, it is desirable to make policy intervention at macro level to ensure strong sustainability. This may be achieved by accelerating ongoing trade reforms in MEA countries to boost export earnings and hence ensure the ability of external debt in the long run.

This paper investigates the sustainability of Malaysia’s current account balance for the period 1970 – 2010. In the framework of inter-temporal budget constraint the paper seeks to understand the behaviour of exports and imports of Malaysian economy. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds tests approach proposed by Pesaran et al. (2001) is applied to examine the long cointegrating relation between Malaysian exports and imports plus interest on external borrowing and it is found that these two variables are cointegrated. This implies that Malaysia’s current account is sustainable in the long run. However, as the long-run coefficient is greater than, it is concluded that the current account is weakly sustainable. This findings call for policy intervention at macro level to make efficient utilization of excess saving to boost economic growth.