April 19, 2021
Regional and community planning professor Kashem earns Foundation of Islamic Finance Conference Award
Shakil Kashem, assistant professor of landscape architecture and regional & community planning, co-authored a paper that won the Certificate of Best Paper Award.
The paper, "Efficiency of Islamic vs. Conventional banks: Evidence from Agent Based Modelling simulation," was presented at the 11th Foundation of Islamic Finance Conference 2021, March 20-22.
Of the papers presented/discussed as evidencing original contributions to literature, four papers won the Certificate of Best Paper Award. The winning papers are to be published subsequently in one or more journals associated with the conference.
The paper is co-authored by Javed Bin Kamal, assistant professor of business administration, East West University, Bangladesh; and Salim Rashid, professor emeritus of economics, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
According to the paper, Islamic banking stands on the "tenet" that without undertaking any risks, any excess amount taken from the borrower is "Riba"— i.e., interest — and hence considered as "haram" — i.e., forbidden — under the Sharia-compliant lending. This study presents the first attempt to implement an agent-based modeling framework for investigating the effects of profit-loss sharing and interest-based lending on the wealth level of the borrowers for pre-policy testing of the efficiency level of Islamic banking vs. mainstream (conventional) banking. Under the agent-based modeling paradigm, agents interact randomly across the time, where the agent’s behavior set is used for the purpose of simulation. Results of simulation for different scenarios show that there are fewer negative impacts of profit-loss sharing on the wealth level of borrowers compared to interest-based lending. Simulation results also show that Islamic bank borrowers suffer a less negative impact on the wealth level when they face idiosyncratic shocks. This modeling has important implications for introducing Islamic banking in the conventional system and demonstrates the resiliency of Islamic banking against exogenous shocks such as a global financial crisis or recent COVID-19 pandemic.
The 11th Foundation of Islamic Finance Conference 2021 was organized by an international consortium of seven universities that share the goal of developing Islamic finance as a scholarly discipline: Sunway University, Malaysia as the host organizer jointly with INCEIF, Malaysia; Istanbul University, Turkey; Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar; Istanbul Commerce University, Turkey; La Trobe University, Australia; and Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University, Turkey.