The global influence of oil futures-prices on Dow Jones Islamic stock indexes

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the global influence of crude and refined oil futures prices on Dow Jones Islamic equity indices (DJIMI) during the recent global financial crisis under structural breaks in the conditional volatility of oil futures prices. Design/methodology/approach - It aims at exploring the long-run and the short-run elasticity and causal relationships using an ARDL bound testing approach and a vector error correction model. Findings - The main findings confirm the presence of long-run relationship for DJIM emerging markets index compared to other global and sub-regional developed indexes. Speed of adjustment to the long-run equilibrium is moderate and the effect of structural breaks, produced from nonlinear volatility model with long memory (LM), is overall not pronounced for that relationship. Short-run causality is bi-directional but long-run Granger causality does not run from refined oil to the DJIMI and crude oil. Research limitations/implications - The paper demonstrates the implicit extent of international financial integration of Islamic stock markets in light of the global influence of oil prices. Practical implications - The findings offer some highlights to researchers, portfolio managers and policymakers. Originality/value - The paper gives an answer to an identified need to test the position of Islamic equity markets as booming Islamic investment and socially responsible investment areas to the global influence of the new soaring path of oil markets. It uses as well bounds testing approach and tests weak and strong causalities under structural breaks. It considers as well LM behavior in oil prices along with the asymmetry property in oil prices.