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This paper aims to investigate the nonlinear effects of bank regulation stringency on bank lending in 23 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1997–2017.

This study employs the dynamic panel threshold regression (PTR) model, which addresses endogeneity and heterogeneity problems within a nonlinear framework. It also uses indices of entry barriers, mixing of banking and commerce restrictions, activity restrictions and capital regulatory requirements from the updated databases of the World Bank's Bank Regulation and Supervision Surveys as measures of bank regulation.

The linearity test results support the existence of nonlinear effects in the relationship between bank lending and entry barriers or capital regulations in the selected SSA economies. The dynamic PTR estimation results reveal that bank lending responds positively when the stringency of entry barriers is below the threshold of 62.8%. However, once the stringency of entry barriers exceeds that threshold level, bank credit reacts negatively and significantly. By contrast, changes in capital regulation stringency do not affect bank lending, either below or above the obtained threshold value of 76.5%.

These results can help policymakers design bank regulatory measures that will promote the resilience and safety of the banking system but at the same time not bring unintended effects to bank lending.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the nonlinear effects of bank regulatory measures on bank lending using the dynamic PTR model and SSA context.

The study aims to estimate the short- and long-run effects of monetary policy on residential property prices in South Africa. Over the past decades, there has been a monetary policy shift, from targeting money supply and exchange rate to inflation. The shifts have affected residential property market dynamics.

The Johansen cointegration approach was used to estimate the effects of changes in monetary policy proxies on residential property prices using quarterly data from 1980 to 2022.

Mortgage finance and economic growth have a significant positive long-run effect on residential property prices. The consumer price index, the inflation targeting framework, interest rates and exchange rates have a significant negative long-run effect on residential property prices. The Granger causality test has depicted that exchange rate significantly influences residential property prices in the short run, and interest rates, inflation targeting framework, gross domestic product, money supply consumer price index and exchange rate can quickly return to equilibrium when they are in disequilibrium.

There are limited arguments whether the inflation targeting monetary policy framework in South Africa has prevented residential property market boom and bust scenarios. The study has found that the implementation of inflation targeting framework has successfully reduced booms in residential property prices in South Africa.

For close to two decades, the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) has been preparing to launch a second monetary union within the ECOWAS region. This study aims to determine the impact such a unionised monetary regime will have on financial stability as represented by the nonperforming loan ratios of Ghana in a counterfactual framework.

This study models nonperforming loan ratios as dependent on the monetary policy rate and the business cycle. The study then used historical data to estimate the parameters of the nonperforming loan ratio response function using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The estimated parameters are further used to estimate the impact of several counterfactual unionised monetary policy rates on the nonperforming loan ratios and its volatility of Ghana. As robustness check, the Least Absolute Shrinkage Selection Operator (LASSO) regression is also used to estimate the nonperforming loan ratios response function and to predict nonperforming loans under the counterfactual unionised monetary policy rates.

The results of the counterfactual study reveals that the apparent cost of monetary unification is much less than supposed with a monetary union likely to dampen volatility in non-performing loans in Ghana. As such, the WAMZ members should increase the pace towards monetary unification.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by explicitly modelling nonperforming loan ratios as dependent on monetary policy and the business cycle. The study also settles the debate on the financial stability cost of a monetary union due to the nonalignment of business cycles and economic structures.

The purpose of this paper is to fill the momentous gap by explicitly investigating the asymmetric effects of monetary policy (MP) on non-bank financial intermediation (NBFI) assets.

The authors utilized panel data from 29 countries for the period of 2012–2020 and used the quantile regression estimation. In addition to simultaneous quantile regression (SQR), the authors also employ quantile regression with clustered data (Parente and Silva, 2016) and the generalized quantile regression (GQR) method (Powell, 2020).

The empirical results show a significant heterogeneous impact of MP. While there is a positive relationship between MP and NBFI assets (“waterbed effect”) at lower quantiles of NBFI assets, at middle and higher quantiles, MP has a negative impact on NBFI assets (“search for yield” effect). The authors further find that negative impact strengthens as the quantile levels of NBFI assets rise from mid to high. Findings also reveal that “procyclicality” (except higher quantile) and “institutional demand” hypotheses hold. However, regarding “regulatory arbitrage,” mixed results are observed indicating the impact of Basel III requirements.

Previous empirical studies have concentrated on either the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) framework or conditional mean regression approaches and delivered mixed findings of the MP effects on NBFI. The current paper takes a step toward dealing with this issue by deploying quantile regression methodology, which shows the impact of MP on NBFI at different conditional distributions (quantiles) of NBFI assets instead of just NBFI's conditional mean distribution.

This study examined how economic freedom and its related components, such as open markets, regulatory efficiency, rule of law and the size of government, affect bank risk behavior, focusing on the Japanese context.

The study employs a two-step GMM framework on the annual data of Japanese banks ranging from 2005 to 2020 to empirically test the hypotheses. Furthermore, we also use the ordinary least square method to ensure the robustness of our mainline findings.

The finding suggests that economic freedom increases the banks' risk-taking, thus making them fragile. The results also highlight that out of the four main subcomponents of economic freedom, regulatory efficiency and government size increase bank risk-taking, while the rule of law and open markets decrease banks' risk-taking. Additionally, we examine how the banks' specific characteristics affect the results by creating a subsample based on capitalization and liquidity ratios. Overall, the results are consistent with the baseline findings. Moreover, the results are robust to alternative proxy measures of risk.

The study's findings have several implications for regulators and policymakers. The results suggest that regulators and policymakers should reconsider their strategies for economic freedom to ensure that they promote stability in the banking system and reduce banks' risk-taking inclinations.

Although previous studies have examined the impact of economic freedom on bank stability and risk-taking, this study is the first to do so in the Japanese context, contributing to the literature by providing new insights and empirical evidence.

This paper aims to document the impact of shadow banking on non-performing loans (NPLs) of publicly listed banks in an international setting.

This paper uses the data from 27 countries and various estimation strategies to test the arguments presented in this paper. The sample covers the period between 2002 and 2020.

The empirical results suggest that banks headquartered in countries with high shadow banking activity have fewer NPLs than otherwise similar banks headquartered in countries with low shadow banking activity. The findings remain qualitatively the same in different sub-samples and after replacing the main variables with their alternate proxies. The paper also shows that this relationship is sensitive to bank-specific characteristics. Moreover, the paper also indicates that the stringency of banking regulations weakens the relationship between shadow banking and NPLs.

The study’s data limitations prevent a detailed year-by-year analysis of NPLs and shadow banking, restricting insights into their evolving dynamics. In addition, the focus on country-level shadow banking data limits the exploration of how multinational banks’ activities in various jurisdictions impact individual banks’ NPLs.

The paper not only documents the effect of shadow banking on NPLs but also shows that the relationship between shadow banking and NPLs weakens as banking regulations become more stringent.

The reason for concern is the rapid decline in loans to small enterprises which is critical to their performance, compared to large businesses following the periods of banking reformations in Nigeria. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of risk perception on bank lending behaviour to small enterprises. It also investigates the impact of government intervention, consolidation and recapitalization on the relationship between risk perception and bank lending behaviour to small enterprise.

This study empirically analysed (ordinary least square) secondary data obtained from the Central Bank of Nigeria Statistical Bulletins, Annual Statement of Accounts covering the period 1992–2020.

The results show that the absence of government interventions and the presence of banking reformations have statistically negative significant effect on bank lending to small enterprises. The findings challenge the argument that generally assumes risk aversion of banks towards small enterprise lending because of small enterprise’s inability to prove their credit worthiness and consequently constraining access to finance to the sector. Instead, the results and analysis from this study found theoretical support for the variation of bank behaviour in lending to small enterprises depending on the status of wealth of the financial system.

A key lesson from this study for government concerned about promoting performance of the small enterprise sector is that regulating and enforcing lending requirements on access to debt financing of the sector is necessary if constraints in access debt finance is to be eliminated. Second, while strategies such as bank consolidation, recapitalization may help strengthen and make financially robust the banking system; it places the banks in a gain position where losses looms to them than gain.

This study challenges the argument that generally assumes risk aversion of banks towards small enterprise lending as a result of inability to prove their credit worthiness and consequently constraining access to finance to the sector. Instead, the results and analysis from this study reveal a variation in lending to small enterprises and suggests that the position of the bank in relation to a reference point influences how risk is perceived by the bank and thus impacts on their risk decision-making behaviour.

This study aims to provide a better comprehension of the behavioural intentions that influence the adoption of Islamic financial technology (Fintech) in Malaysia for two kinds of Islamic lending Fintech services, which are crowdfunding and peer-to-peer (P2P) lending.

From May to July 2022 the primary data were collected by using a questionnaire distributed online to survey 437 Islamic Fintech clients in Malaysia. Structural equation modelling has been used to analyse the data based on using the partial least squares approach.

The findings of this paper shows that planned behaviour, acceptance model and technology's use models are positively impacting factors that influence customers' opinions on adapting Islamic Fintech services in lending. The acceptance model was found to exert a negative impact on the intention to adopt Islamic lending P2P Fintech service. In addition, technology's use has a negative impact on the intention to adopt Islamic lending crowdfunding Fintech service.

First, the study is limited to Islamic Fintech customers in Malaysia only, second, the study adopted an online survey but there is no guarantee that the geography area was fully covered. Another limitation is that the study covers only Islamic Fintech services in lending, thus the study did not attend to variables such as religiosity and the authors believe that this will provide useful insights for future research.

Despite the importance of this topic, there has been a lack of empirical evidence until now. In this paper, the authors take stock of the empirical evidence in the literature through the importance of the adoption Fintech. This study provides a broad view of the market potentials for Fintech providers from the demand side on a wide range of Islamic Fintech services rather than focussing only on payment, transfer, etc. as presented in previous studies.

Since banks do not sell tangible products, they rely heavily on customer interactions and retention, which requires service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Banks must innovate and develop new services and expand customer engagement efforts beyond stores, kiosks, direct mail and websites to include social media, mobile applications and location-based services in order to meet their customers’ growing demands. A multi-channel strategy that integrates the offline and online presences of banks can increase quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty. This paper aimed to use a service quality scale to: (1) examine the association between service quality and customer satisfaction; (2) examine the association between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty; (3) examine the indirect association between service quality and customer loyalty through customer satisfaction; and (4) examine the mediation effect of multi-channel integration quality in the relationships between service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

The data was obtained from banks in Saudi Arabia. The analysis was based on an online survey of 265 Saudi bank customers. The multi-channel integration quality model and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) were used to test the proposed hypothesis and conduct the analysis.

The results found that there was a statistically significant link between service quality and customer satisfaction in the Saudi banking industry. Service quality did not directly affect customer loyalty. When multi-channel integration quality was moderate to high, service quality affected customer loyalty through customer satisfaction. For service quality and customer loyalty in the Saudi banking sector to be achieved, customers must be satisfied, but also the bank’s brand must manage the quality of integration channels provided to them with care, and thus branding plays a key role in achieving customer loyalty in the Saudi banking sector.

The academic community has provided little evidence to support how the relationships between constructs such as service quality, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and multi-channel integration quality apply to the Saudi banking sector. A conceptual framework was proposed to show how these constructs affect the Saudi banking sector. An empirical study was conducted to see how the framework held up in banking settings. The conceptual framework serves to advance the fields of business and management and banking and their respected literature, as well as advance the understanding of multi-channel integration in boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty through high service quality in the Saudi banking sector.

This article aims to investigate how institutional characteristics affect the level of financial development of economies collectively and compare between developed and undeveloped economies.

A dynamic panel with 131 countries, including developed and developing ones, was utilized; the estimators of the generalized method of moments system (GMM system) model were selected because they have econometric characteristics more suitable for analysis, providing superior statistical precision compared to traditional linear estimation methods.

The results from the full panel suggest that concrete and well-defined institutions are important for financial development, confirming previous research, with a more limited scope than the present work.

Limitations of this research include the availability of data for all countries worldwide, which would make the research broader and more complete.

A panel of countries was used, divided into developed and developing countries, to analyze the impact of institutional variables on the financial development of these countries, which is one of the differentiators of this work. Another differentiator of this research is the presentation of estimates in six different configurations, with emphasis on the GMM system model in one and two steps, allowing for comparison between results.