Performance of Islamic stocks versus conventional stocks during crisis and non crisis period: Evidence from MENA region.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the performance of both Islamic and conventional stocks, and to investigate whether the Islamic filtering criteria acts as a shield of protection for investors during crisis or not, based on a panel sample of 12 countries in the MENA region covering 10 different sectors from 1998-2018. Using panel fixed effect regression. We divided out sample into three periods; 1998-2006 pre-crisis period, 2007-2008 crisis period and 2009-2018 post crisis period. Our main finding is that the filtering criteria has a positive relation with the returns significant for the post crisis period and positive significance for the two other periods; crisis and pre crisis