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The purpose of this study is to examine whether regulations can prevent financial crises based on the case of Sweden in the 20th century. The evolution of banking regulation relies heavily on learning across borders as well as responding to recent and remembered crises. Sweden went from being an open economy with a highly protected national banking system with several banking crises under the Classical regime, through the Statist regime with no crises followed by abrupt liberalisation in the 1980s as the country changed to a more market-based regime. This study examines the regulatory responses to crises in each of these periods to assess how, and whether, an often backward-looking regulatory framework can address forward-looking risks.

This study is a qualitative study using a historical method. The authors use archival material, official publications and statistical data as well as secondary literature to succinctly analyse crises and regulatory responses in different regulatory regimes in the 20th century. The theoretical framework builds on three macro- and microeconomic policy regimes, the Classical, the Statist and the Market regime.

The authors find that regulations can play a decisive role in alleviating a banking crisis, but the relationship between regulations and economic development is complex, and regulations alone cannot prevent a crisis.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first longitudinal study of banking regulations in Sweden and how these change in response to crises with the aim of improving the role of banks in financial intermediation and financial stability. This study contributes to a body of literature on financial crises with a long-term perspective and an assessment of regulations as a policy response.

Commercial banks face several risks, including credit, liquidity, operational and disruptive risks. In addition to these risks that are challenging for banks to control and manage, crises and disasters can exert substantially more destructive shocks. These shocks can exacerbate internal risks and cause severe damage to the bank's performance, leading banks to bankruptcy and closure. This study aims to facilitate achieving resilient banking policies through a model-based assessment of business continuity management (BCM) policies.

By applying a system dynamics (SD) methodology, a systemic model that includes a causal structure of the banking business is presented. To build a simulation model, data are collected from a commercial bank in Iran. By presenting the simulation model of the bank's business, the consequences of some given crises on the bank's performance are tested, and the effectiveness of risk and crisis management policies is evaluated. Vensim Personal Learning Edition (PLE) software is used to construct the simulation model.

Results indicate that the current BCM policies do not show appropriate resilience in the face of various crises. Commercial banks cannot create sustainable value for the banks' shareholders despite the possibility of profitability, as the shareholders lack adequate resilience and soundness. These commercial banks do not have the appropriate resilience for the next pandemic after coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Moreover, the robustness of the current banking business model is very fragile for the banking run crisis.

A forward-looking view of resilient banking can be obtained by combining liquidity coverage, stable funding, capital adequacy and insights from stress tests. Resilient banking requires a balanced combination of robustness, soundness and profitability.

The present study is a combination of bank business management, risk and resilience management and SD simulation. This approach can analyze and simulate the dynamics of bank resilience. Additionally, present of a decision support system (DSS) to analyze and simulate the outcomes of different crisis management policies and solutions is an innovative approach to developing effective and resilient banking policies.

This study aims to empirically investigate the impact of political instability on the banking stability of the dual banking system in the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries.

The study measures banking stability with probability of default (PD) and Zscore by employing the generalised method of moment (GMM) between 2007 and 2021 on the dual banking system in the region. The authors further estimate short-long-run situations coupled with a robustness test using a generalised least square (GLS) model.

The authors' findings indicate that institutional factors of political stability, crisis period, high-crisis countries, law and order and macroeconomic indicators influence the two types of banking stability in the region. The authors found the consistency of the factors explaining stability in the region in both short-and long-run situations. Consequently, the study also reveals the adverse effects of crisis periods and high-crisis countries on banking stability.

The results of this study explicitly identify the critical need for sustaining political stability and abiding by laws and order to achieve dual banking stability in the region. Therefore, policymakers may consider allowing the region's banks to operate beyond retail banking since diversification enhances banking stability.

The authors' study balances by employing dual stability measurement in predicting the impact of political instability, law and order and other indicators on the MENA region's two banking models. This study uncovers the effect of the global crisis period on banking stability and high-crisis countries in the region and verifies the models' robustness.

Financial crises (FC) remain a global threat to the financial stability of financial institutions and international bank regulatory capital requirement (IBRCR) by the Committee on Banking Supervision provides mechanism for curbing the adverse effect of FC on financial stability. Hence, the purpose of this study is to provide, evidence on how IBRCR tones down the adverse FC effects on bank financial stability (BFS).

The study uses 102 economies between 2006 and 2016 in a two-step dynamic generalized method of moments model.

The results show that while FC and IBRCR negatively and positively impact BFS, respectively, it is observed that under the increasing presence of IBRCR, the negative effect of FC on BFS declines. Additionally, the results show that economies that maintain minimum IBRCR above 10.5% recommended by BASEL III are able to reinforce a significant reduction in the negative effect of FC on BFS.

These findings imply that in as much as financial crisis is injurious to BFS, regulators and policymakers can rely on IBRCR to avert the injurious effects of FC on BFS. Clearly, while IBRCR is necessary for reinforcing BFS through FC, bank managers who maintain IBRCR above the recommended 10.5% stands a better chance to taming the avert effect of FC on BFS. Additionally, economies that have not full adopted the BASEL minimum capital requirement may have to do so given its potential of dampening the adverse effect of FC on BFS.

The study presents an international perspective of how BASEL capital requirements can help tame global financial crisis using a global sample of 102 economies.

This study aims to empirically investigate the impact of oil prices, political instability and changes in stability on the bank diversification of the two types of banking systems in the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries.

The study uses bank diversification, stability measurement of probability of default and Zscore by adopting the generalised method of moment for the data between 2007 and 2021. The authors estimate short- and long-run dynamic panel analysis and a robustness test.

The findings reveal that Islamic banks are slightly lower in diversification and stability than conventional peers in the region. Diversification increases with a positive increase in GDP growth, law and order, political stability, bank size, asset quality, oil price, return on equity, profitability and change in banking asset-based stability. The authors found consistency in the two stability measurements in both short- and long-run situations.

Despite the change in banking stability and economic growth and oil prices improved diversification, banks in the region are not diversifying during the crisis period and political instability. Therefore, policymakers should improve mechanisms to monitor the crisis and political unrest to avoid the systemic risk that adversely affects the system through macro-financial linkages in the region.

This study uses change dual stability measurements and oil prices to predict MENA region bank diversification. The authors extended the banking literature by estimating the relationship between crisis periods, political and banking stability, oil prices and other institutional indicators of banking diversification. This study uncovers the effect of the global crisis period on banking diversification and the impact of banking stability changes and validates the models through robustness tests.

This paper aims to contribute to the political connection literature by investigating the impact of political connection on banks’ profitability in Bahrain.

Exploiting the unique natural experiment of the 2017 Qatar blockade crisis, this study uses primary data of political connection. The study uses the difference-in-difference (DID) methodology to investigate the effect of political connections on banks’ profitability.

The main finding is that political connections have a positive effect on bank profitability in Bahrain. The paper finds that the ongoing GCC crisis has had a negative effect on the banking sector of Bahrain. During the Qatar blockade crisis, politically connected banks suffered more than their non-connected counterparts.

The result suggests that the Qatar blockade crisis has had a notable effect on the banking system throughout the region, including both the boycotting countries as well as Qatar. In the banking sector, politically connected banks are the most harmed by the crisis. Investors can enhance their hedging and investment decisions by exploiting knowledge of how political connections affected bank profitability during the Qatar diplomatic crisis and how that effect can be transmitted from one market to another. In addition, regulators could use insights about the association between political connections and profitability in Bahrain to undertake strategies to increase banks’ profitability and mitigate the transmission effect of a crisis by ensuring adequate regulation and supervision.

This paper offers four novel contributions to political connection literature as follows: Firstly, the study fills in an important gap in the literature as it is the first attempt to quantify the impact of political connections on bank performance in Bahrain. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the role of political factors in Bahrain has not been studied about the banking system. Secondly, the study depends on primary data about political connections collected manually from various sources. Thirdly, this is the first study to investigate the effect of the Qatar blockade on the banking sector. Lastly, the evidence suggests that politically connected banks are more profitable than banks that lack political connections. However, the Qatar blockade crisis resulted in a sharp decrease in bank profitability, suggesting that the crisis significantly harmed the banking sector in Bahrain.

After the global financial crisis, many countries deregulated their banking sectors. The banking sector has become the major funding supplier in most emerging countries. Bank in Indonesia has provided an essential role as an intermediary institution in matching up surplus and deficit parties with a relatively concentrated market structure. Moreover, banks should innovate and diversify to provide excellent products and services to their customers and win the market. More diversified banks are expected to have better performance and more resilience, especially during a crisis. This study examines the relationship among bank market power, diversification, and bank stability of listed bank companies in Indonesia from 2008 to 2020. This study employs a two-step system GMM to deal with potential endogeneity. This study finds that banks’ market power and diversification affect bank stability, and the presence of crisis encourages banks to be more prudent. The result of this study provides insightful implications for academics and policy-makers.

This paper surveys the literature on economic research in banking. Two streams of empirical research were reviewed. The first stream of empirical research focus on research examining the effect of bank behaviour on economic performance. The second stream of empirical research focus on research on the effect of economic events on bank behaviour and performance. We provide our views about what we have learned from this research and about what else we would like to know.

This study investigates the role of market concentration and efficiency in banking system stability during the COVID-19 pandemic. We empirically test the hypothesis that market concentration and efficiency are significant determinants of bank performance and stability during the time of crises, using a sample of 575 banks in 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The main sources of bank data are the BankScope and BankFocus (Bureau van Dijk) databases, World Bank development indicators, and official websites of banks in MENA countries. This study combined descriptive and analytical approaches. We utilize a panel dataset and adopt panel data econometric techniques such as fixed/random effects and the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator.

The results reveal that market concentration negatively affects bank profitability, whereas improved efficiency further enhances bank performance and contributes to the banking sector’s overall stability. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that during the COVID-19 pandemic, bank stability strongly depended on the level of market concentration, but not on bank efficiency. However, more efficient banks are more profitable and stable if the banking institutions are Islamic. Similarly, Islamic banks with the same level of efficiency demonstrated better overall financial performance during the pandemic than their conventional peers did.

The main limitation is related to the period of COVID-19 pandemic that was covered in this paper (2020–2021). Therefore, further investigation of the COVID-19 effects on bank profitability and risk will require an extended period of the pandemic crisis, including 2022.

This study provides information that will enable bank managers and policymakers in MENA countries to assess the growing impact of market concentration and efficiency on the banking sector stability. It also helps them in formulating suitable strategies to mitigate the adverse consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our recommendations are useful guides for policymakers and regulators in countries where Islamic and conventional banking systems co-exist and compete, based on different business models and risk management practices.

The authors contribute to the banking stability literature by investigating the role of market concentration and efficiency as the main determinants of bank performance and stability during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is the first to analyze banking sector stability in the MENA region, using both individual and risk-adjusted aggregated performance measures.

Country crises can provoke damages to a country's economic activity and citizens in a way that will always demand a deeper understanding of their determinants. Political issues are commonly mentioned as an important factor boosting these crises. This paper investigates the political factors behind financial crises and recessions.

Using variables from the ICRG rating system, logistic panel regressions are run to determine whether or not the political risk variables explain country crises.

Results disclose the importance of socioeconomic conditions to financial crises and recessions with no influence from the political arena. Against expectations, political instability does not help to explain crises. Political risk ratings also show their importance, demonstrating that the higher is the risk, the higher is the probability of debt and currency crises occurrence.

The findings in this paper contribute to a growing literature of political risk and crises, enhancing the value of political risk assessment and increasing the application of its consequences.