Characteristics of Shari’ah Governance and Incidence of Charity: A case of Pakistan

Abstract

There are several studies which have evidenced the role of Shari’ah governance on the profitability of Islamic banks for different countries in different data setup. The main purpose of Shari’ah governance is derived from the concept of corporate governance to avoid any non-compliant transactions and book charity against any non- compliant income. There are two kinds of Shari’ah supervisory boards. First is the proactive type that follows the rule of ‘Hisba’ which restricts any non-compliant transaction before it happens. The second type is reactive which detects and reacts to the non-compliant transactions following the Islamic legal system when they happen. The first type would conclude to a reduction in the incidence of charity transactions. In contrast, the second type would conclude to increase in the incidence of charity transaction. The objective of this study is to explore whether the Shari’ah governance of Islamic banks of Pakistan is jointly proactive or reactive. This study is deductive and uses quantitative methods. This study builds an unbalanced panel data of full-fledged Islamic banks of Pakistan using the available data from financial statements. This study is one of its kinds to see the nature of Shari’ah governance based on empirical patterns using Panel FGLS model. The results show that board size, board expertise, and reputation are the reactive factors while the others are proactive factors.