Interest Rate, Exchange Rate, and Stock Prices of Islamic Banks: A Panel Data Analysis

Understanding the empirical relationship between the exchange rates, interest rates and stock prices are important and useful to the policy makers, professional investors and academics. Although the scholars and practitioners have studied the subject extensively, few empirical studies are available in the context of the Islamic banking stock prices. In this paper, we make an humble attempt to fill in this gap in the empirical literature of Islamic banking, in particular. We use panel cointegration and panel vector error-correction (VECM) model to examine the existence and direction of the causal relationship between exchange rate, interest rate and Islamic banking sector stock prices using monthly data over the last five years. The VECM is employed to discern the short-run and long-run Granger causality by applying the dynamic Generalized Method of Moments (dynamic GMM). For 40 Islamic banks, the empirical results tend to indicate that the Islamic bank stock prices have negative significant relationship with the exchange rates but no significant relationship with the interest rates. In addition, we found that there exists a bidirectional Granger-causal relationship between the Islamic bank stock prices and exchange rates. This finding tends to suggest that this significant relationship between the exchange rates and Islamic bank stock prices should be borne in mind by the policy makers while formulating their policies.