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Several theoretical and empirical studies have shown the significant effects of economic and environmental factors on a large number of financial indicators. In this paper the authors are going to study whether the main stock market index, is impacted by the variations of the exchange rate and the interest rates.

This paper studies the response of the index market return to fluctuations in the interest rate and the exchange rate in five countries from the MENA region (Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey and Jordan). To investigate whether this impact exists, the authors used the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model with daily data from June 1998 to June 2018.

The application of the non-linear ARDL model confirms the presence of cointegration between return index, interest rate and exchange rate. The results show that the asymmetry hypothesis is only valid for the short run which suggests that the market index is sensitive to the variation in the interest rate and exchange rate. This means that these macroeconomic factors play an important role in the MENA region stock markets.

The findings confirm that the index returns in the MENA region stock markets are related to macroeconomic fundamentals such as the exchange rate and the real interest rate. The reaction of some indices is sensitive to whether the shocks are positive or negative. This finding may help investors to choose their strategies starting from these changes. Accordingly, policy makers must pay attention to the development progress of stock market.

The purpose of this chapter is to cover banking efficiency using the concept of the Meta frontier function and to study group and subgroup differences in the production technology. This study estimates the technical efficiency (TE) and technology gap ratios (TGRs) for banks in Islamic countries. Using the assumption of the convex hull of the Meta frontier production set using the virtual Meta frontier within the nonparametric approach as presented by Battese and Rao (2002), Battese et al. (2004), and O'Donnell et al. (2007, 2008) and after relaxing this assumption, the study investigates if there is a significant difference between these two methods. To overcome the deterministic criterion addressed to nonparametric approach, the bootstrapping technique has been applied. The first part of this chapter covers the analytical framework necessary for the definition of a Meta frontier function and its estimation using nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the case where we impose the assumption of the convex production set and follows in the case of relaxation of this assumption. Then we estimated the TE and the TGR in concave and nonconcave Meta frontier cases by applying the Bootstrap-DEA approach. The empirical part will be reserved for highlighting these methods on data bank to study the technical and technological performance level and prove if there is a difference between the two methods. Three groups of banks namely commercial, investment, and Islamic banks in 17 Islamic countries over a period of 16 years between 1996 and 2011 are used.