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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine monetary policies and bank lending in the emerging economies of Sub-Sahara Africa. Design/methodology/approach: The dynamic system-generalized method of moments (GMM) that overcomes issues of unobserved period and country-specific effects, as well as potential endogeneity of explanatory variables, is applied in the estimation exercise. The study uses the data for 80 banks across 20 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2010 to 2019. Findings: The findings show that expansionary monetary policy such as an increase in money supply stimulates bank lending, while contractionary monetary policies like increase in the monetary policy rates by the central banks lead to credit contraction, albeit a weak effect due to possible underdevelopment of financial markets, institutional constraints, bank concentration and other rigidities in the system characteristic of developing countries that undermine the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission. Capital adequacy ratio and size of economic activities are other variables that significantly influence bank lending channels. Practical Implication: Sub-Sahara Africa countries can enhance the effectiveness of monetary policy transmission on bank lending through the effective use of the transmission mechanism of changes in money supply and monetary policy rate. Originality/value: While greater empirical attention has been devoted to the nexus between monetary policies and macroeconomic variables in country-specific studies, the connection between monetary policies and bank lending at an extensive regional or cross-country level is still scanty. For Sub-Saharan Africa, there is a palpable lack of empirical evidence on this. This study, therefore, seeks to fill this gap in a region where the impact of monetary policies on credit intermediation is crucial to the economic diversification efforts of the governments of Sub-Sahara Africa.

The goal of this research work is to determine the predictive power of the activity volume at the Dubai International Airport (DXB) over the Emirati stock market by applying the GARCH, EGARCH, TGARCH, and PGARCH models. Our results provide evidence that the DXB's passenger traffic has explanatory power over the Emirati stock market. Specifically, we find that the logarithmic monthly change of the DXB's passenger traffic has a positive and significant relationship with the ADX stock market index's monthly log-returns. We also find that two analysed Emirati stock markets indexes have positive and significant relationships with both the crude oil price and the log-returns of a world stock market index.

This paper studies an investor’s optimal investment, optimal net debt ratio with collateral security and optimal consumption plan in an economy that faces both diffusion and jump risks. The underlying assets are tangible and intangible assets. There have been major challenges of quantifying intangible assets. In this paper, we assume that the price of our intangible asset follows a jump-diffusion process. The tangible asset of the investor is divided into two parts: financial and nonfinancial (fixed) assets. Financial assets are invested into a market that is made up of a riskless asset and multiple risky assets (stocks). The fixed asset and stock prices follow jump-diffusion processes. This paper aim at (1) maximizing the total expected discounted utility of consumption in the infinite time horizon in the presence of both tangible and intangible assets, (2) determining the optimal net debt ratio for an investor in the presence of jumps, (3) determining the effect of intangible assets on the investor’s portfolio and (4) determining the optimal portfolio strategies of an investor who invest in an economy that is exposed to both diffusion and jump risks. This paper obtained the optimal consumption, optimal portfolio strategies and optimal net debt ratio of an investor under some suitable utility functions. We found that the value of the intangible assets depends explicitly on all the market parameters including the production rate, optimal wealth and optimal debt ratio of the investor over time. This implies that any change in the market parameter values, optimal investment, optimal net debt ratio and the production rate will lead to changes in the values of the intangible assets.

The study examines the relationship between corporate attributes and ESG disclosure among selected companies in United Arab Emirates. The corporate attributes are company size, profitability, liquidity, industry sensitivity and leverage. The descriptive statistics reveals a maximum disclosure score of 78 and a minimum score of 32. The results of the regression analysis show that only company size, industry sensitivity and liquidity are significant determinants of ESG disclosure in UAE. Our findings show that firms with larger asset base and good degree of liquidity disclose more ESG information. However, firms in the service sector are more inclined to ESG disclosure than manufacturing firms. We recommend that the board of directors should make sustainability reporting a front burner in its corporate strategy. In addition, the regulatory authorities should legalise ESG disclosure among UAE firms. Finally, lenders of corporate funds should make certified ESG report as a major condition precedent to obtaining funds.