The Effects of Government and State Ownership on Dividends

This study aims to investigate the relationship between government ownership and dividend policy of Malaysian listed companies. The study used a sample of 400 companies which were randomly chosen. Two dependent variables were used as a proxy for dividend namely the dividend per share (DPS) and dividend payout ratio (DPR), while 8 government agencies (EPF, LTH, KWAP, LTAT, MKD, KNB, PNB and STATE) represented the government ownership. Since dividends are truncated, the Tobit model was utilized to examine the effect of government ownership. The findings showed that the there is no relationship between government ownership and dividend when using DPS as dependent variable. However, when DPR is used, the result showed that government ownership could affect the dividend policy. Furthermore, it is found that privately funded government agencies were more likely to affect dividend. This result indicates that these government agencies are rather influence the proportion of earnings distribution or the payable amount than the amount of dividend per unit of shares

Time Series Prediction of Bitcoin Cryptocurrency Price Based on Machine Learning Approach

Over the past few years, Bitcoin has attracted the attention of numerous parties, ranging from academic researchers to institutional investors. Bitcoin is the first and most widely used cryptocurrency to date. Due to the significant volatility of the Bitcoin price and the fact that its trading method does not require a third party, it has gained great popularity since its inception in 2009 among a wide range of individuals. Given the previous difficulties in predicting the price of cryptocurrencies, this project will be developing and implementing a time series approach-based solution prediction model using machine learning algorithms which include Support Vector Machine Regression (SVR), K-Nearest Neighbor Regression (KNN), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to determine the trend of bitcoin price movement, and assessing the effectiveness of the machine learning models. The data that will be used is the close prices of Bitcoin from the year 2018 up to the year 2023. The performance of the machine learning models is evaluated by comparing the results of R-squared, mean absolute error (MAE), mean squared error (RMSE), and also through a visualization graph of the original close price and predicted close price of Bitcoin in a dashboard. Among the models compared, LSTM emerged as the most accurate, followed by SVR, while XGBoost and KNN exhibited comparatively lower performance

Commercial law in Malaysia

This book has its origin in a compilation of lecture notes of the Commercial Law and Malaysian Business Law which are the core courses for Bachelor of Accounting and Bachelor of Business Administration students of the International Islamic University Malaysia. Its primary objective is to provide students commencing legal studies and also lay readers a general overview on the commercial legal environment in Malaysia. In particular, this book is designed to meet these specific objectives: • To equip the readers with a basic understanding of the commercial laws in Malaysia • To expose to the readers on haw to refer and apply the laws when they are involved in the commercial transactions • To study the Shari'ah principles regulating commercial transactions and compare to that of conventional dealing

FOUR NUANCES OF ISLAMIC FINANCE RESEARCH: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS APPROACH FOR EXPLORING THE STRUCTURE OF RESEARCH

Background and Purpose: Islamic finance is an important driver of the economy for the Muslim world, particularly to the developing Muslim majority countries in Southeast Asia. Scholars continue to pay close attention to Islamic finance research because it differs from conventional finance in many ways. Islamic finance research, like other fields of study, has to take a step back to evaluate what has been accomplished, who has contributed, and what the trending research topics are throughout its development. To that end, this research aims to investigate the structure of Islamic finance research by identifying its key nuances to date.   Methodology: This study uses the VOSviewer program to perform bibliometric analysis techniques, particularly the citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-word analysis, to investigate the structure of Islamic finance research. The analyses were conducted by identifying the scientific journals that have a significant impact in the field based on a sample of 1,567 articles spanning the years 1955 to 2019, or 65 years of research.   Findings: The major findings of the study are the identification of the four key nuances that form the structure of Islamic finance research and the most referred publications for each of the nuances using citation, bibliometric coupling and co-word analysis. The key nuances include:  1) Bank performance, stability, corporate governance, and risk management; 2) Customer’s patronization and satisfaction factors; 3) Islamic microfinancing and social banking; and 4) Islamic capital market products and performance.   Contributions: This study presents an easy-to-read network of research nuances useful for understanding the Islamic finance literature and supporting future research in this field. The study also provides practical contributions to Islamic financial institutions by showing the major areas of focus to improve or sustain them in the industry.   Keywords: Bibliometric analysis, Islamic finance nuances, literature review, co-word, bibliographic coupling.   Cite as: Abdullah, A. R., Abdullah, S. S., Zainuddin, S. A., Azmi, N. F., & Abdullah, T. (2023). Four nuances of Islamic finance research: A bibliometric analysis approach for exploring the structure of research. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 8(1), 158-183. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol8iss1pp158-18

Customer perception towards relationship marketing practices in Takaful industry

In certain business organization, acknowledging public perception towards their business practices may give a positive impact towards the future business performance. Similarly, to ensure the sustainable of Takaful industry as an alternative Islamic insurance, getting customers’ perception towards their marketing practice is important. It is so because without effective marketing practices, the Takaful products could not reach the public with the sole purpose as was planned in the earlier stage. This research thus proposes three constructs of relationship marketing and investigates the customers’ perception regarding the Takaful agents’ relationship marketing practices. It includes their Islamic ethical behaviour, product knowledge, and information communication. To achieve these objectives, this research adopted self-administered survey questionnaire and distributed it to the Takaful customers in Klang Valley area. Result from data analysis based on SPSS version 19 regards that the public particularly Muslim in rural area not totally agreed with the relationship marketing practices of their Takaful agent. This research contributes to strengthen the Takaful industry in reaching the same level with the conventional insurance particularly their effective marketing channel

Design of FPGA- Based SPWM Single Phase Full-Bridge Inverter

Nowadays power inverters serve as an important emergency power supply system in events of main power supply failure. The AC output voltage of a power electronic inverter is usually non-sinusoidal and hence has a high harmonic content. Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation (SPWM) scheme is normally used to convert the DC power supply into AC power supply by comparing the reference voltage waveform with the triangular waveform known as carrier. SPWM provides a way to reduce the total harmonic distortion of load current. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate a SPWM switching scheme by using Altera DE2-70 board. In this SPWM technique, a sinusoidal reference voltage waveform is compared with the triangular carrier voltage to generate the on and off switching states. This switching scheme will trigger the gate of the power switch. In this paper, the SPWM switching strategies implemented using Altera DE2-70 (Cyclone II EP2C35F672C6) with 16 bit serial configuration devices. The switching between reference and carrier waveforms of SPWM is obtained by using Matlab software. Simulation on the design waveform is conducted using Quartus II software tools provided by Altera. The output frequency of SPWM is 50 Hz and the design is limited to two values of modulation indices which are 0.5 and 0.75

An effective hybrid local search approach for the post enrolment course timetabling problem

We address the post enrolment course timetabling (PE-CTT) problem in this paper. PE-CTT is known as an NP-hard problem that focuses on finding an efficient allocation of courses onto a finite number of time slots and rooms. It is one of the most challenging resources allocation problems faced by universities around the world. This work proposes a two-phase hybrid local search algorithm to address the PE-CTT problem. The first phase focuses on finding a feasible solution, while the second phase tries to minimize the soft constraint violations of the generated feasible solution. For the first phase, we propose a hybrid of Tabu Search with Sampling and Perturbation with Iterated Local Search. We test the proposed methodology on the hardest cases of PE-CTT benchmarks. The hybrid algorithm performs well and our results are superior compared to the recent methods in finding feasible solutions. For the second phase, we propose an algorithm called Simulated Annealing with Reheating (SAR) with two preliminary runs (SAR-2P). The SAR algorithm is used to minimize the soft constraint violations by exploiting information collected from the preliminary runs. We test the proposed methodology on three publicly available datasets. Our algorithm is competitive with the standards set by the recent methods. In total, the algorithm attains new best results for 3 cases and new best mean results for 7 cases. Furthermore, it is scalable when the execution time is extended

Harmony Search Algorithm for the Multiple Runways Aircraft Landing Scheduling Problem

This paper proposes a Harmony Search (HS) algorithm to solve the multiple runways aircraft landing scheduling (ALS) problem. ALS is a combinatorial optimization problem that has been recognized as an NP-hard problem. It deals with assigning landing times and runways for a set of arrival aircrafts. Each aircraft has its predefined target landing time within a time window, and a separation time between each successive pairs of aircrafts. The objective of ALS problem is to minimize the deviation from the target landing time of each aircraft subject to a set of constraints. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on thirteen benchmark instances ranging from 10 to 500 aircrafts, and 1 to 5 runways. The results show that the proposed algorithm works considerably well on small-sized instances