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This paper explains the value of interpreting the design of a country's financial safety net as an exercise in incomplete social contracting.

Safety net contracts unlucky financial institutions and customers to transfer some or all of what would otherwise be ruinous losses to taxpayers in other sectors. Their capacity to do this is based on a series of unspoken and slowly varying cultural norms that govern when government support is supplied to an insolvent bank, in what forms, on what terms and under what limitations. Identifying these norms is the purpose of this paper. Identifying similarities in the norms that hold sway in the United States and China is the main contribution this paper has to offer.

Regulators do not want to face the consequences of challenging large insolvent banks' claims that funding problems that their managers know to be hopeless reflect a spate of reversible bad luck and a temporary shortfall in liquidity. In hopes of shifting the problem forward to their successors, regulators forbear from meaningful intervention until and unless crisis-driven depositor runs force them into action.

This means that much like US rescue arrangements, one can demonstrate that the Chinese safety net is incomplete in four ways. It does not fully delineate the events that trigger a loss transfer. It sets formal but imperfectly enforceable limits on the size of potential loss transfers. The political obligations that actually persuade state actors to bail out major banks in a crisis are largely implicit and optional in timing, magnitude and transparency. Finally, the identity of the citizens who will be forced to absorb the costs of crisis bailouts is also optional. Who pays and how they do so will be determined in part during the crisis but will not be finalized until well after the crisis has blown over.

The analysis makes it clear that authorities, express commitment to fair and efficient modes of financial supervision is destined to break down under crisis pressure unless the disadvantaged equity stake that the safety net assigns to taxpayers is rebalanced to record and collect taxpayers' deserved share of the profits a country's megabanks book during booms.

In recent years, the central monetary authorities of some Gulf Cooperation Council countries have made several regulatory changes in order to achieve social & economic goals. The monetary authorities of these countries have strengthened prudential norms. Asset classifications and provisioning norms have moved closer to international standards. Banks are required to maintain capital to risk weighted assets ratios of 8 per cent required by the BIS. Local banks follow International Accounting Standards. Although the central monetary authorities of the GCC countries are active in supervising and monitoring their regulations on financial institutions, but not in a rapid way. In a global financial market, Islamic‐banking regulators that operate Islamic banks should think about the compatibility of the regulatory setting. Through a deep understanding of the nature of the Islamic banking business and the recent western banking supervisory framework, Islamic banking regulators will be able to develop a sound banking system without loosing its own distinction.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between operational risk management (ORM), size, and ownership of Indian banks. This is important in the context of financial crisis experienced by developed countries due to lax regulation.

ORM practices of Indian banks are proxied by excess capital (over the required minimum capital for operational risk). Size of a bank is measured as deposits plus advances. Our sample includes 61 Indian banks during the period from 2010 to 2013. The authors empirically examine the impact of bank size on excess capital using panel data regression model.

The results suggest that size of Indian banks is inversely related to excess capital held by them for managing operational risk. The inverse relationship implies that smaller banks hold higher excess capital over the required minimum as per Basel norms. There is no significant relationship between ownership (public, private and foreign) and excess capital held by banks for managing operational risk.

The study has implications for Indian banks given the high level of losses due to bad loans, and the implementation of Basel III norms by the central bank, i.e. Reserve Bank of India.

The study has implications for Indian financial system as a large percentage (about 33 per cent) of household savings are deployed in deposits with commercial banks and other financial institutions. The bank failure(s) can have disastrous consequences for the Indian economy as the capacity of the Indian financial system to withstand such shocks is highly doubtful.

There is very little evidence on ORM practices of Indian banks, and its relationship with size and ownership. The study assumes significance in the context of significant changes in the institutional and regulatory framework.

This study aims to explore the perceptions of investors regarding the risks associated with funding renewable energy projects in India, as well as the various factors that influence these perceptions. The investigation is limited to debt providers and seeks to pinpoint the primary risks that bankers perceive and the drivers that shape these perceptions.

This study draws on interviews and surveys of Indian bank executives, investigating how finance providers perceive risks in the Indian context and the factors driving such perceptions. Qualitative interviews have been used for operationalizing “risk perception” within the renewable energy domain, followed by a quantitative survey and exploratory factor analysis.

The authors find that experience and capacity are the most important factors that account for 30% of the overall variance. The second factor, which accounts for 15% of the variance, includes the perceived risks in funding renewable energy projects as compared to infrastructure projects. Among individual risks, the authors find that bankers perceive technological risk to be the lowest (5%) and contractual and regulatory risks as the highest (66%) in renewable energy projects.

The study contextualizes risk perception toward renewable energy investments in the Indian context by drawing from the risk perception literature and qualitative interviews with senior bankers. It presents empirical evidence on the decision-making behavior of bankers, who are important stakeholders of the renewable energy ecosystem. The main limitation of the study is the relatively small sample, and generalizing the results to the broader population might require a larger sample. This will facilitate the use of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, which can facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of risk perceptions in renewables financing.

Insights gained can be used to provide policy recommendations for improving the financing ecosystem of renewable energy projects. The research significantly contributes to the extant literature within the renewable energy financing domain for emerging economies.

For a book claiming that it “introduces the reader to the major concepts,” I was quite disappointed by the papers devoted to the application of economic reasoning to legal rules. No one directly defined the core of the Chicago approach. There were no quotations from Becker about the “economic way of thinking” and no mention of Posner's famous claim that “the common law bears the stamp of economic reasoning.” This section provides examples from three papers to illustrate the lack of a clear presentation of the meaning of the economic analysis of the law, as defined by the Chicago school.

The direct nexus between board characteristics, earnings management (EM) practices and dividend payout is examined in this study, followed by an examination of the indirect mediation impact of EM practices in the nexus between board characteristics and dividend payout. It aims to provide new empirical evidence from the Jordanian market, which is an emerging market.

The study population consists of all service firms that were listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) between 2012 and 2019. Due to the lack of availability of their complete data during the period, four service firms were omitted from the population; hence, a sample of 43 service firms was acquired over the time frame (2012–2019), yielding a total of 344 firm-year observations. Moreover, panel data analysis was employed in this study, and data for the study were acquired from yearly reports as well as the ASE's database.

Based on the GMM estimator findings, board size and independence have a negative and significant influence on the EM, but CEO/chairman duality has a positive and significant impact. Simultaneously, the impacts of female representation on the board of directors and the number of board meetings were both positive but insignificant. The findings also found that four board characteristics, including board size, female representation on the board of directors, CEO/chairman duality and the number of board meetings, had a significant negative or positive effect on dividend payout, while board independence did not. Additional findings show that EM practices have a direct negative insignificant effect on dividend payout, whereas EM practices partially mediate the relationship between board characteristics and dividend payout.

The current study's limitation is that it only searched in Jordanian service firms listed on ASE from 2012 to 2019 to fulfill the study's objectives; thus, we urge that future work explores the study models for other sectors, whether in Jordan or other growing markets such as the Middle East and North Africa.

The findings of this study may be utilized by analysts, investors and other strategic decision-makers to enhance Jordan's financial market's efficiency and efficacy. These findings will improve policymakers' willingness to impose appropriate constraints, perhaps boosting Jordan's financial market performance and efficacy. These findings may also help investors make more enlightened judgments by utilizing board characteristics and EM factors that predict firm dividend policy.

Contradictions in the results of earlier investigations inspired the current study, with the findings filling a gap in the existing literature. This study differs from previous studies by constructing a novel research model and analyzing the mediating influence of EM in the nexus between board characteristics and dividend payout.

This paper aims to examine the determinants of intention to adopt Islamic microfinance among prospective customers in Nigeria, to enhance access to formal financial services.

The quantitative study used the proportionate stratified random sampling technique to collect data from 450 respondents, using close-ended questionnaires. The data was analyzed using analysis of moment structures-structural equation modeling. The decomposed theory of planned behavior (DTPB) was used as the underlying theory to test 10 hypotheses.

Results showed the intention toward the adoption of Islamic microfinance is high in Nigeria. In total, 8 of the 10 study hypotheses were supported, out of which attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control were found to have a positive and significant influence on the behavioral intention to adopt Islamic microfinance. Consequently, the study recommends the need for stakeholders in the Nigerian financial system to embark on enlightenment campaigns that will improve the public attitude on the role of Islamic microfinance banks in the promotion of financial inclusion and poverty reduction.

The study focused specifically on three selected states in Northern Nigeria that are predominantly Muslim. The findings and indeed the conclusions of the study, may not be suitable for generalization to other parts of the country.

The study found that three constructs: attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control were found to affect behavioral intention. Thus, the Central Bank of Nigeria and Islamic financial institutions should tailor their enlightenment campaigns toward improving public attitude on the need to adopt Islamic microfinance banks to further enhance financial inclusion, and thus reduce the incidence of poverty. Islamic microfinance banks should complement their commercial products and services with Islamic social finance products such as Sadaqat, Zakat and benevolent loan, as is the practice in jurisdictions where Islamic finance is institutionalized.

The social implication of the study is its ability to determine factors that will enhance financial inclusion in Nigeria. This will assist in reducing poverty and income inequality.

The study was also able to extend the DTPB by introducing awareness as an additional latent construct in explaining attitude.

The new economic-policy regime in Sweden in the 1990s included deregulation, central-bank independence, inflation targets and fiscal rules but also active labour market policy and voluntary incomes policy. This chapter describes the content, determinants and performance of the new economic policy in Sweden in a comparative, mainly Nordic, perspective. The new economic-policy regime is explained by the deep recession and budget crisis in the early 1990s, new economic ideas and the power of economic experts. In the 1998–2007 period, Sweden displayed relatively low inflation and high productivity growth, but unemployment was high, especially by national standards. The restrictive monetary policy was responsible for the low inflation, and the dynamic (ICT) sector was decisive for the productivity miracle. Furthermore, productivity increases in the ICT sector largely explains why the Central Bank undershot its inflation target in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The new economic-policy regime in Sweden performed well during the global financial crisis. However, as in other OECD countries, the moderate increase in unemployment was largely attributed to labour hoarding. And the rapid recovery of the Baltic countries made it possible for Sweden to avoid a bank crisis.