http://dspace.uiu.ac.bd/handle/52243/192 2026-04-12T21:09:58Z http://dspace.uiu.ac.bd/handle/52243/3457 Geopolitical Risk and Stock Market Volatility Islam, Sadia This study shows how Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) and Geopolitical Risk (GPR) affect stock market ups and downs in 17 major countries from January 2012 to December 2025. This study used a Panel Fixed Effects model. This study also uses three types of market changes: absolute volatility, squared volatility, and 12 month rolling volatility. It uses last month’s values to show how markets react with a delay. The results shows that both EPU and GPR make the market unstable. But their impacts are different from each other. That means they did not affect the market in the same way. EPU has a strong and most steady effect. From This we can see investors care a lot about to changes. Markets react quickly to global events. Then they adjust soon. The effect does not last long. The study also shows that GDP growth. The market becomes more stable when there was a GDP growth. This means a strong economy helps to keep financial markets stable. So, these findings show that stable economic policies are more important mainly for long-term market stability. This can help policymakers reduce uncertainty. And it will also help investors to make better decision. 2025-03-28T00:00:00Z http://dspace.uiu.ac.bd/handle/52243/3456 Impact of Cross-Country Conflict on Stock Market Return Khan, Mohammad Aqib This study looks at how cross-country conflicts affect stock market returns. It also shows how a country’s financial health changes this effect. Many studies say that conflicts always reduce market performance. But this study wants to test if that is always true. It looks at a country’s financial strength, like government debt and foreign exchange reserves. These factors help us understand how badly the market is affected. The study uses monthly data. It has 616 observations from six countries. These countries are India, Israel, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, and Ukraine. The data covers the time from February 2017 to September 2025. A Two-Way Fixed Effects model is used in this study. It also uses Driscoll–Kraay standard errors to measure the results properly. The results show that conflicts do not always cause a big drop in stock returns. Sometimes the effect is small. The impact depends on a country’s financial condition. In countries with high debt, the negative effect becomes much stronger. In countries with low foreign exchange reserves, the effect is even worse. It can be more than 16 times stronger than normal periods. This means stock market drops after conflicts are mainly caused by weak financial conditions. It is not only because of the conflict. Overall, the study shows that strong reserves and low debt are very important. These help protect markets from outside attacks. The findings are useful for investors and policymakers. They also help us understand how economies stay strong during difficult times. 2026-03-28T00:00:00Z http://dspace.uiu.ac.bd/handle/52243/3407 Unlocking the Digital Dividend in Emerging Markets: A Hybrid Econometric and Machine Learning Solution to the Firm Productivity in Bangladesh Mashfiqul Haque, Ariyan The study describes the effect of digitalization of SMEs on the productivity of the labor force in Bangladesh. It seeks to determine the tools which are most significant. According to the information presented by the World Bank in 2022, in its Enterprise Survey, I have applied both the methods of econometrics and machine-learning implementation to get beyond the relationships and find the causality. I have two portions of our empirical approach. Part A uses fixed-effects OLS, interaction models, quantile regressions, and propensity-score matching (PSM) to estimate the impacts of adopting digital on productivity controlled by firm variation and due to observed selection bias. Part B applies machine-learning models and methods of explainability to tree models, including SHAP values and Partial Dependence plots (PDPs), to determine non-linear effects and threshold effects of a predictive, non-causal setting. The effects of digital strength on labor productivity point to it being, according to fixed-effects estimates, a positive relationship. Regression of the components also indicates that this growth is mainly due to the transactional tools, especially online payment, which is not due to the presence of online entities, such as just having a website. The interactive model shows that companies that have more experienced managers get increased gains, and this outlines the importance of managerial capacity. The quantile regressions determine high amounts of heterogeneity; the productivity increases are non-significant in low-productivity firms and significantly higher in high-productivity firms. To estimate the causal impact of the use of online payment, we use PSM in which we take it as a discrete treatment. The Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT) has the closest approximation of adding 0.40 log points to the labor productivity of the adopters as compared with non-adopters of the same kind. In a range of corresponding approaches, clustered bootstrap tests and doubly robust estimators, this observation is so. The sensitivity tests show that it is resistant to moderate unknown confounding. It was also tried using an instrument-variable design based upon the diffusion of regions, giving a weak first-stage relevant test, and is therefore hard to interpret causally. The results of the machine-learning algorithms are added to the econometric data. Out-of-sample predictive models are acting in a good manner, and SHAP and PDP analysis show good evidence that the non-linearity exists: productivity growth is more rapid when not less than two digital tools are implemented in the company. Overall, we have identified a capacity-based digital dividend - an improvement of productivity in the presence of transactional digitalization and the capacity of managers, and not the online nature of the firms. 2026-03-31T00:00:00Z http://dspace.uiu.ac.bd/handle/52243/3406 Employees’ Perceptions on Effectiveness of Credit Risk Management and Its Contribution to Financial Stability in HSBC” Afsana Akter, Mony 2026-03-03T00:00:00Z