Islamic mutual funds' financial performance and international investment style : evidence from 20 countries
Abstract
We pursue the first large scale investigation of a strongly growing mutual fund type: Islamic funds. Based on an unexplored, survivorship bias adjusted dataset, we analyse the financial performance and investment style of 265 Islamic equity funds from twenty countries. As Islamic funds often have diverse investment regions, we develop a (conditional) three level Carhart model to simultaneously control for exposure to different national, regional and global equity markets and investment styles. Consistent with recent evidence for conventional funds, we find Islamic funds to display superior learning in more developed Islamic financial markets. While Islamic funds from these markets are competitive to international equity benchmarks, funds from especially Western nations with less Islamic assets tend to significantly underperform. Islamic funds’ investment style is somewhat tilted towards growth stocks. Funds from predominantly Muslim economies also show a clear small cap preference. These results are consistent over time and robust to time varying market exposures and capital market restrictions.
Citation
Hoepner , A G , Rammal , HG & Rezec , M 2011 , ' Islamic mutual funds' financial performance and international investment style : evidence from 20 countries ' , European Journal of Finance , vol. 17 , no. 9-10 , pp. 829-850 . https://doi.org/10.1080/1351847X.2010.538521
Publication
European Journal of Finance
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1351-847XType
Journal article
Rights
© 2011 Taylor & Francis. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in the European Journal of Finance on 1 March 2011, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1351847X.2010.538521
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