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This study examines the impact of competition and concentration on bank income smoothing in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries.

The two-step system GMM method was used to analyse the impact of competition and concentration on bank income smoothing in 17 CEEs from 2004 to 2015.

Loan loss provisions (LLPs) are negatively related to bank competition and concentration. The authors find no evidence for income smoothing using LLPs in a high-competition or high-concentration environment.

A limitation of the study is that the analysis was restricted to commercial banks. The authors did not examine investment banks or microfinance banks in this study. Also, not having access to databases does not allow them to include recent years in the study.

CEE commercial banks will likely keep fewer provisions or engage in under-provisioning when they face intense competition, and this can expose them to credit risk, which may threaten their stability.

This study is the first to investigate the effect of concentration and competition on income smoothing among CEE banks.

The global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–2008 had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, triggering widespread economic turmoil. We use the event-study method to investigate whether investors priced the effect of significant events before the Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy in European and Asia-Pacific banks. Abnormal returns on the event days range from −4.32% to 5.03% in Europe and −5.13% to 6.57% in Asia-Pacific countries. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt on September 15, 2008, abnormal returns averaged the lowest at −4.32% in Europe and −5.13% in Asia-Pacific countries. The significant abnormal returns show that Lehman Brothers' collapse was a turning point, and investors paid attention to the precrisis events as warning signs of the oncoming crisis.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to offer a discussion on the role played by Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in enhancing financial inclusion. The central interest of the study is to place CBDC on the financial inclusion landscape and provide insights on potential opportunities and barriers in making CBDC a strong building block of financial inclusion, as well as the digital financial system.

Design/methodology/approach: This chapter is a conceptual work that builds on relevant literature. This study identifies and suggests potential aspects that can help in the adoption of CBDC as a tool for financial inclusion.

Findings: This chapter analyses opportunities, barriers, and concerns for CBDC in the context of financial inclusion and discusses how critical functions of blockchain technology can lead to the acceptance and adoption of CBDC. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated how CBDC can pave the way for financial inclusion and benefit the existing financial system taking more people from financial exclusion towards financial inclusion.

Originality/value: This is evident that CBDCs and financial inclusion need to be intertwined to support upcoming technological transformations happening in the digital financial ecosystem. Therefore, CBDCs must be viewed from varying lenses to understand the relevance of including CBDCs in the financial system can be expanded. Further, repercussions from the given framework are suggested.

This chapter explores the influence of the banking and insurance sectors on the economic growth of Czechia, a nation with unique financial dynamics ideal for this study. Our aim is to ascertain the contribution of these financial institutions to economic growth, addressing the divergence in empirical findings that have marked this research area for decades. We scrutinise the impact of various factors, including sectoral development and the efficiency and stability of these institutions, all within the Czech context. Utilising the Granger causality test, we assess the role of several indicators related to the development of the banking and insurance sectors. Our findings reveal that in Czechia, the evolution and operational efficiency of these financial institutions significantly drive economic growth. This study provides an in-depth understanding of the role these sectors play in the Czech economic landscape, affirming their crucial contribution to the nation's economic prosperity.

The purpose of this chapter is to cover banking efficiency using the concept of the Meta frontier function and to study group and subgroup differences in the production technology. This study estimates the technical efficiency (TE) and technology gap ratios (TGRs) for banks in Islamic countries. Using the assumption of the convex hull of the Meta frontier production set using the virtual Meta frontier within the nonparametric approach as presented by Battese and Rao (2002), Battese et al. (2004), and O'Donnell et al. (2007, 2008) and after relaxing this assumption, the study investigates if there is a significant difference between these two methods. To overcome the deterministic criterion addressed to nonparametric approach, the bootstrapping technique has been applied. The first part of this chapter covers the analytical framework necessary for the definition of a Meta frontier function and its estimation using nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) in the case where we impose the assumption of the convex production set and follows in the case of relaxation of this assumption. Then we estimated the TE and the TGR in concave and nonconcave Meta frontier cases by applying the Bootstrap-DEA approach. The empirical part will be reserved for highlighting these methods on data bank to study the technical and technological performance level and prove if there is a difference between the two methods. Three groups of banks namely commercial, investment, and Islamic banks in 17 Islamic countries over a period of 16 years between 1996 and 2011 are used.

This study aims to investigate whether socially responsible businesses with corporate social expenditure are less prone to engaging in tax avoidance. The study also examines whether political connections moderate the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and tax avoidance.

The study uses ordinary least squares to analyse the panel data of all 30 listed banks on the Dhaka Stock Exchange covering 2012 to 2020. The study uses a set of alternative variables to check the robustness of the findings.

Confirming the corporate culture theory, the study findings indicate that the higher the firms’ CSR expenditure, the lower the tax avoidance. Contrarily, the moderating effect of political connection weakens the role of CSR in tax avoidance, implying that political relation makes the firms socially irresponsible. Besides, the findings document that firms with strong political connections are more likely to be tax aggressive by weakening the role of CSR. The findings imply that firms with weaker political connections are more socially responsible than firms with strong political ties.

The study provides the bank management and regulatory bodies valuable insights to take necessary actions so that they can easily monitor whether the banks follow their instructions regarding CSR and tax payments. As the politicians make the firm socially irresponsible, the regulatory bodies and bank management should not keep them or their relatives on the board.

The study contributes to the CSR and tax avoidance literature considering the moderating role of political connections in Bangladesh banking sector.

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.

This study aims to examine how board gender diversity and foreign directors influence the sector-wise corporate philanthropic giving (donation) of Islamic banks in Bangladesh.

Unbalanced panel data were extracted from the annual reports of Islamic banks in Bangladesh over 11 years, from 2010 to 2020.

The findings indicate that gender diversity significantly improves corporate philanthropic giving for the education sector but insignificantly influences corporate philanthropic giving for health and humanitarian and disaster relief sectors. In contrast, the results show that foreign directors significantly and positively affect the banks' corporate philanthropic giving for the three sectors.

This paper used only secondary data extracted from the annual reports of Islamic banks in Bangladesh between 2010 and 2020. Besides, only three sectors of corporate social responsibility activities were considered. Hence, the findings could not be generalized, as the study used only data from one country.

The findings can be useful to policymakers and regulators to provide policies and regulations that ensure the appointment of women and foreign directors to boards that can competently promote Islamic banks' charitable donations.

Inducing Islamic banks to provide corporate donations for activities related to education, health and humanitarian and disaster relief can contribute directly to achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) like SDG-3 (good health and well-being) and SDG-4 (quality education) and impliedly support attaining some indicators of SDG-1 (no poverty), SDG-2 (zero hunger) and SDG-10 (reduced inequality).

This study contributes to the literature by investigating how board gender diversity and foreign directors influence sector-wise corporate donations for the education, health and human and disaster relief sectors instead of aggregate donations studies concentrated by previous studies.

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.

Sustainable development (SD) is widely acknowledged as the center around which all development efforts should revolve. Banking is a crucial component of SD, and the adoption of sustainable banking practices by various banking institutions is a powerful catalyst for its achievement. This paper aims to investigate the level of adoption of environmental, social and governance (ESG) indicators in India and the extent to which financial institutions use these strategies. In addition, the banks have been classified according to their sustainable banking performance and showing a relationship between ESG and sustainability.

An ESG framework has been developed for the Indian banking system that focuses on the behavior of banks. The evaluation of literature helps to identify the gaps in particular frameworks for analyzing sustainable banking practices in developing nations because of the variation in economic criteria between developed and developing countries. An attempt to construct a common framework for measuring the banking sector’s sustainable efforts has been done in the past. Specifically in India, where the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability are of equal importance to governance indicators, these studies fall short of providing relevant indicators. Multiple financial reports, nonfinancial reports, corporate social responsibility reports and business responsibility reports of this sector were analyzed using content analysis techniques against ESG indicators for sustainability attainment.

The result of this study shows that both the sectors are disclosing their environmental indicators more as compared to other dimensions. While the analysis says that private companies are going better than public companies in terms of disclosing their ESG indicators. As compared to the international banking sector, adoption of Global Reporting Initiatives standards, United Nations Environment Programme Financial Initiatives (UNEP FI), Green Credit Policy and Equator Principles (EP) is near to the ground in India. IDFC bank is the only entity that started implementing EP practices and Yes bank also is doing a wonderful implementation of the green policies and is the signatory to UNEP FI.

The current state of sustainable banking in India is reflected in the implementation of the proposed framework. To better integrate sustainability problems into banking, this study provides helpful information for banks and other stakeholders. In addition, this study corrects the lack of research in the Indian context on sustainable banking.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge by far, this is one of the prime studies to inspect the degree of ESG disclosure by the Indian banking sector in their sustainability report.