• Begum, M., Rahman, M. M., & Faruq, M. O. (2024). Impact of regulatory capital on bank interest margins: Moderating role of default risk. Heliyon, 10(10).

The recent pandemic and aftermath debate regarding bank interest margins deserve special attention and have become policy dialogue in emerging economies. However, the previous literature's findings were largely inconclusive and ignored influential variables such as the impact of default risk on bank interest margins. Using a two-step system GMM estimation considering 32 Bangladeshi commercial banks from 2000 to 2022, we produce robust evidence that higher regulatory capital restrictions reduce the bank interest margin, while increased default risk induces the bank interest margin. The impact intensity during the COVID pandemic is higher than in the pre-COVID period. Moreover, we find the synergy effect of regulatory capital and default risk assists in reducing the bank interest margin. Bank margin persistently fell during the capital market crash period, whereas it rose in the financial crisis period. We cast several robustness tests to confirm our main findings. These findings could generate important implications for bank stakeholders and policymakers.

• Dey, P. K., & Faruq, M. O. (2019). Determinants of intellectual capital disclosure: An investigation on DS30 firms in Bangladesh. Asian Journal of Accounting Perspectives.

Research aim: The study aims to investigate intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) practices and its determinants in Bangladesh. Design/Methodology/Approach: The top 30 firms known as DS30 companies that reflect around 51 percent of the total equity market capitalisation have been considered as a sample. Content analysis is used to extract the data from the annual report of the respective firm for the years 2013 to 2017. Multiple regression analysis is performed to identify the determinants of ICD. Research findings: This paper finds that board independence and globally affiliated auditors have a substantial positive impact on ICD. In contrast, board gender diversity documents marginally significant negative association with ICD. However, our examination does not show any significant impact of board size, leverage, profitability and firm size on ICD quality. Theoretical contribution/ Originality: This study differs in its approach of narrowing down the items of ICD index to maintain the perspective of a developing country like Bangladesh. It is a longitudinal study and does not consider any particular industry of Bangladesh to identify the drivers of ICD. Practitioner/ Policy implication: Policymakers and regulators could consider the factors identified in this paper for setting corporate reporting regulations, particularly corporate governance mechanisms. Research limitation: This study considered only the top 30 firms and 30 disclosure items. Our investigation is limited to only the annual reports of the respective companies. 

• Faruq, M. O., Akter, T., & Rahman, M. M. (2023). Does intellectual capital drive bank’s performance in Bangladesh? Evidence from static and dynamic approach. Heliyon, 9(7).

This paper investigates the relationship between measures of intellectual capital efficiency and the performance of the listed banks in Bangladesh. We have collected data from the listed bank's published annual reports for seven years (2015–2021). We have primarily used standard panel data analysis techniques to assess the static relationships. In addition, to the static models, we have also checked the dynamic models for robustness in the context of Bangladesh. Following the RBV (Resource Based theory), we have found that the MVAIC (Modified Value-Added Intellectual Coefficient) significantly and positively determines firm performance in both static and dynamic methods. However, various components of MVAIC show differing relationships, which indicates that the two-step system GMM (Generalized Method of Moments) is superior to static models. The moderating role of MEETING (Company Meetings) is significant with respect to MVAIC. In addition, the moderating role of corporate governance variables at the component level remained the same in both methods. Our further analysis of the association with respect to the before and during pandemic periods suggests that the relationship remains the same irrespective of the period under study. Future research can use this paper to understand the significance of dynamic modeling while studying IC (Intellectual Capital) in an emerging economy context. This is among a few studies that have applied both static and dynamic models to assess the relationship between IC and firm performance in the context of emerging economies. Policymakers and bank managers in Bangladesh could use the findings of this study to realize that IC is much more valuable than other available tangible assets in creating a sustainable competitive advantage.

• Rahman, M. M., Akhtar, S., Hooi, K. K., Faruq, M. O., & Majumder, M. T. H. (2026). Stability or Sacrifice? The Role of Regulatory Capital and Ownership in Shaping Bank Interest Margins. Asia-Pacific Financial Markets, 1–48.

This article examines the impact of regulatory capital and ownership on the bank’s interest margin. Bank interest margins have drawn renewed scholarly and policy attention in the wake of COVID-19 and, earlier, the global financial crisis. To achieve the study’s aims, two regression approaches were employed: the system generalized method of moments (GMM) and pooled ordinary least squares (OLS). The authors evaluated the hypothesis using data from 32 Bangladeshi commercial banks spanning 24 years (2000–2023). The findings from this robust study indicated that tighter regulatory capital requirements compress bank interest margins. Ownership also matters: Islamic banks exhibit markedly lower margins than comparable conventional banks. The COVID-19 shock appears stronger than pre-pandemic dynamics, while margins widened during the global financial crisis. The results remain valid after employing several estimation techniques and alternative proxies. Moreover, the results remained robust when controlling for bank-level, industry-level, and macroeconomic-level variables. The findings provide enhanced guidance for bank regulators, scholars, and policymakers on how to capitalize on the reduced bank interest margins resulting from the imposition of higher regulatory restrictions.

• Samia, M. M., Rajee, A., Hasan, M. R., Faruq, M. O., & Paul, P. C. (2022). Aspect-based sentiment analysis for bengali text using bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (bert). International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 13(12).​​​​​​​

Public opinion is important for decision-making on numerous occasions for national growth in democratic countries like Bangladesh, the USA, and India. Sentiment analysis is a technique used to determine the polarity of opinions expressed in a text. The more complex stage of sentiment analysis is known as Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), where it is possible to ascertain both the actual topics being discussed by the speakers as well as the polarity of each opinion. Nowadays, people leave comments on a variety of websites, including social networking sites, online news sources, and even YouTube video comment sections, on a wide range of topics. ABSA can play a significant role in utilizing these comments for a variety of objectives, including academic, commercial, and socioeconomic development. In English and many other popular European languages, there are many datasets for ABSA, but the Bengali language has very few of them. As a result, ABSA research on Bengali is relatively rare. In this paper, we present a Bengali dataset that has been manually annotated with five aspects and their corresponding sentiment. A baseline evaluation was also carried out using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, with 97% aspect detection accuracy and 77% sentiment classification accuracy. For aspect detection, the F1-score was 0.97 and for sentiment classification, it was 0.77.