Price and volume effects around Islamic index revisions: the case of DJIM-GCC

PurposeThis study explores the price and trading volume effects around the quarterly Dow Jones Islamic Market-GCC index (DJIM-GCC) revisions and investigates whether these reactions are driven by firms' fundamentals or by investors' perception of ethical screening.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopt an event study methodology to analyze the price and volume effects of Islamic indices redefinitions.FindingsThe results exhibit a positive (negative) price reaction for added (deleted) stocks. The authors also document an asymmetric volume response for index additions and deletions. The multivariate analysis of the cumulative abnormal returns reveals that the documented market reaction around Islamic index revisions is mainly related to the compliance attribution (withdrawal).Originality/valueThe approach allows to separate the market reaction arising from changes in firms' fundamentals from that induced by investors' perception of the attribution or withdrawal of a compliance certification. Moreover, the focus on the GCC region, where countries share the same cultural traits and perceive Islamic law identically excludes any social effect that would influence the market reaction due to cultural differences between countries.

The Regulatory State in the Information Age

This chapter explores changes in institutions and processes for economic regulation. The emergence of the platform as informational capitalism’s core organizational logic and of datafication as its principal logic of commodification have disrupted traditional, industrial-era approaches to defining both markets and harms, making it more difficult to articulate compelling accounts of what precisely should trigger regulatory oversight and enforcement. At the same time, settled ways of thinking about the appropriate modalities of administrative lawmaking have come under challenge. Emergent institutional models for oversight of information-economy activities are procedurally informal and emphasize ongoing compliance with performance-based standards intended to guide complex, interdependent sets of practices. Those models also reflect the influence of the managerial turn. They rely heavily on privatized self-regulation, compliance certification by professional auditors, and financialized review to minimize regulatory burdens and costs, and they have tended to be both opaque to external observation and highly prone to capture.

Establishment of Uncertainty Ranges and Probability Distributions of Actinide Solubilities for Performance Assessment in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

The Fracture-Matrix Transport (FMT) code developed at Sandia National Laboratories solves chemical equilibrium problems using the Pitzer activity coefficient model with a database containing actinide species. The code is capable of predicting actinide solubilities at 25 °C in various ionic-strength solutions from dilute groundwaters to high-ionic-strength brines. The code uses oxidation state analogies, i.e., Am(III) is used to predict solubilities of actinides in the +III oxidation state; Th(IV) is used to predict solubilities of actinides in the +IV state; Np(V) is utilized to predict solubilities of actinides in the +V state. This code has been qualified for predicting actinide solubilities for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Compliance Certification Application in 1996, and Compliance Re-Certification Applications in 2004 and 2009.We have established revised actinide-solubility uncertainty ranges and probability distributions for Performance Assessment (PA) by comparing actinide solubilities predicted by the FMT code with solubility data in various solutions from the open literature. The literature data used in this study include solubilities in simple solutions (NaCl, NaHCO3, Na2CO3, NaClO4, KCl, K2CO3, etc.), binary mixing solutions (NaCl+NaHCO3, NaCl+Na2CO3, KCl+K2CO3, etc.), ternary mixing solutions (NaCl+Na2CO3+KCl, NaHCO3+Na2CO3+NaClO4, etc.), and multi-component synthetic brines relevant to the WIPP.