Determinants of budgetary slack and the moderating role of islamic religiosity in sharia-based public governance: Evidence from Aceh, Indonesia

Indonesia is a country with the largest Muslim population in the world. However, since the Islamic banks were being established in Indonesia for about 20 years, their market share only accounts for about 5% in the Indonesian banking system. Muslim participations in using Islamic bank are relatively low. This study expands the Theory of Planned Behavior by adding the variables of religiosity and self-efficacy. Previous studies have not examined this new expanded model to analyze customers who participated in using the saving Islamic bank’s products and services. Based on 220 Islamic bank consumers who participated in the study, the study indicated that questionnaires about religiosity and self-efficacy had good external validity and could be adapted for the Indonesian culture context. The most interesting finding was that the religiosity variable strongly enhanced the use of Islamic banks. Similarly, this study found that the self-efficacy variable improved an intention of customers to participate in the Islamic banking system. This paper also discusses the implications of the findings and recommendations for future studies.

The crumble of financial markets due to the recent crises has wobbled precariousness in the stock market and intensified the returns vulnerability of banking indices. Against this backdrop, this study intends to model the volatility of the Indian Bank Nifty returns using a battery of GARCH specifications. The finding of the present research contributes to the literature in three ways. First, volatility during the sample period, which corresponds to a time of stress (a bear market), is more persistent, with an estimated coefficient of 0.995695. Moreover, when volatility rises, it persists for a long time before returning to the mean in an average of 16 days. Second, for a positive γ, the results insinuate the possibility of an “anti-leverage effect” with a coefficient of 0.139638. Thus, the volatility of the Bank Nifty returns tends to rise in response to positive shocks relative to negative shocks of equal magnitude in India. Finally, the findings demonstrate that EGARCH with Student’s t-distribution offers lower forecast errors in modeling conditional volatility.

The modern approaches towards higher education systems management often tend to focus on separate universities’ performance, lacking the systemic view of the overall higher education systems’ competitiveness. Thus, the policymakers often fail in tailoring the higher education strategies to the mission of higher education in contemporary society.
The article focuses on providing a systemic insight into the global competitive positioning of the national higher education systems. Based on the suggested ranking methodology, the authors perform the evaluation and ranking of 94 higher education systems, highlighting the limitations of this method, and the cluster analysis, identifying 3 types of their competitive positioning: leaders, followers, and underperformers. Based on Pearson coefficients of skewness and kurtosis calculation, the article shows that globally the inequalities in terms of higher education enrolment rate are decreasing, while those of R&D institutions quality and university-industry collaboration in research remain unchanged. Therefore, upgrading higher education quality assurance systems becomes the main strategic priority for the developing countries in terms of ensuring their higher education systems’ competitiveness. Given the levelling of higher education attainment and its quality worldwide, the authors anticipate further specialization of the universities and broadening of their role within the national innovation system. The article shows that the more comprehensive the approach for evaluating the higher education systems performance – the better the policymakers may benefit in terms of higher education strategic management.