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This article highlights the determinants leading to extremist behavior, i.e. the push and pull factors. The pull factors include: humanitarian causes; radical Islamic ideology; stipulation of a "purpose and mission"; propaganda through media; attraction to martyrdom; and misinterpretation of religious ideas by religious and non-religious extremists. The push factors are local conditions that force people to hold close the violent ideology of radical or extremist Islam. These comprise: local reaction against Americanization/globalization; lack of basic human rights; authoritarian/oppressive political systems; corruption/lack of meritocracy; high youth unemployment; state collapse; and porous borders. To investigate the causes of extremism in higher education institutes, Positivist philosophy (survey method) was adopted. A self-administered structured questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of educated youth from all over Pakistan, collected via the probability sampling technique. It was revealed that 'Promotion of Martyrdom' was highly correlated with extremism, and contributed more than other variables to causing extremism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this empirical research, thepurpose was to investigate the impact of trade openness and budget deficits on public debt in Pakistan. In this regard, data was examined spanning from 1975 to 2020. To map both long-run and short-run interactions, we used the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method of co-integration along with ECM approaches. The results show that variables such as public debt, budget deficit, trade openness, and inflation have long-and short-term co-integration. Also, trade openness's coefficient's negative sign with value of-0.759 confirms negative relationship between public debt, trade openness and shows that a 1% upsurge in trade openness will bring a 75.9% decrease in public debt's growth in Pakistan. While budget deficit and inflation both possess a positivesign of coefficients and a positive link with public debt, the coefficient of budget deficit is 0.498, which depicts that a 1% escalation in budget deficit will lead to a rise in public debt of 49.8 percent. In conclusion, Pakistan's national debt is rising due to budget deficit andinflation, but it is falling due to trade openness. To reduce budget deficit, government should balance domestic andexternal debtso as to sustain desired position. So, it issuggestedthe government actively trade internationally to minimize the public debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central theme of this research paper is about the role of idiosyncratic risk in stock returns of non-financial sector of Pakistan Stock Exchange. In the framework of asset pricing model, literature suggests that idiosyncratic risk is independent to the specific assets therefore it has no role in explaining the returns. However, modern portfolio theory suggests that in an under diversified portfolio, idiosyncratic risk has positive relationship with stock returns, while the negative association of idiosyncratic risk has also been reported by different scholars. To settle this issue in the context of Pakistan, the present study investigates the role of idiosyncratic risk empirically in non-financial sector of Pakistan. The daily and monthly data are taken from January 2005 to 2016 for analysis. Various types of statistical tools are applied to examine the association between idiosyncratic risk and stocks returns. Cross sectional regression is used for testing the association between expected conditional idiosyncratic risk and returns. Conditional idiosyncratic risk is estimated through EGARCH model. The empirical results showed that conditional idiosyncratic risk and return of non-financial, firms has significant positive relationship after controlling different factors such as value, momentum and size, whereas the lag idiosyncratic risk has no relationship with stock returns. The empirical evidence confirms the prediction of previous studies. At the end it is suggested that investors can develop profitable portfolio after considering the idiosyncratic risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]