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The purpose of this study is to carry out an empirical investigation about how the level of market concentration or competitiveness of the banking system and institutional quality are associated with bank’s financial stability.

This study uses dynamic panel data techniques on the sample of 133 developing and emerging countries over the years 2002–2020.

The authors document several significant findings. First, there is evidence that bank stability is positively associated with the level of market concentration. The result is in line with the concentration–stability view that banks operating in a more concentrated market tend to be more stable than those in a less concentrated market. Second, the results confirm that the quality of the institutional environment plays a critical role in improving the stability of banks in developing and emerging countries. Third, the authors find that institutional development can moderate the effect of market concentration (or competitiveness of the banking system) on bank stability. Specifically, the results show that better institutional quality enhances the positive influence of bank concentration on the bank’s financial stability in developing and emerging countries. These results are robust to different specifications with the alternative measures of bank stability and market concentration.

This study provides further understanding regarding the effects of the level of market concentration or competitiveness of the banking system and institutional quality on bank stability in 133 developing and emerging countries over the years 2002–2020.

Islamic banks, despite being Shariah-compliant, have long been criticized for mimicking conventional banks in terms of their products and processes (Khan, 2010; Kuran, 1996). However, several Islamic banks do engage in philanthropy (zakat and charity) and risk-sharing financing (mudarabah and musharakah) instruments that better meet their raison d'etre, the fulfillment of Maqasid al-Shariah (Jatmiko et al., 2023). These contracts, however, are more susceptible to moral hazard and adverse selection problems than traditional debt-based finance (Azmat et al., 2015) and may impair Islamic bank stability. This paper explores the relationship between social finance and the stability of Islamic banks, and whether institutional quality moderates this relationship.

Using hand-collected annual data on social finance from 12 Islamic banks in four countries: Bangladesh, Bahrain, Indonesia and Malaysia, between 2006 and 2019, the authors employ the feasible generalized least squares and the panel-corrected standard errors methods for the analysis. The Stata version 16 software was used to analyze the data for the study.

The results indicate that mudarabah and musharakah financing raises the stability of Islamic banks. The authors also found that mudarabah and musharakah expose Islamic banks to more risk-taking behavior amidst the conditioning effect of institutional quality. On the other hand, charity induces the stability of Islamic banks, while zakat increases the risk-taking behavior of the banks. Further, when the quality of institutions was used as a moderator, both zakat and charity induced the stability of Islamic banks. The results were robust when liquidity risk was used and partially robust when portfolio risks were employed as measures of stability.

One concern regarding the application of Islamic social finance is that it might be a risky strategy for Islamic banks. In terms of research implications, the available evidence suggests that the use of Islamic social finance instruments is not detrimental to the stability of Islamic banks. Hence, regulators and policymakers should not penalize Islamic banks for using Islamic social finance instruments that help provide financial solutions to the underserved and unserved. In terms of research limitations, the study could not include other relevant Islamic social finance instruments such as waqf and qard al-hassan. Furthermore, data availability restricts the analysis to only 12 Islamic banks in fourcountries. As more Islamic banks in different countries venture into Islamic social finance, and the quantity and quality of information improve, future studies could explore the issue further.

The available evidence suggests that the use of Islamic social finance instruments does not worsen the stability of Islamic banks. Given the dominance of sale- and lease-based contracts in Islamic financing (Aggarwal and Yousef, 2000; Šeho et al., 2020), these findings should encourage other Islamic banks to provide financial solutions using other Shariah-compliant contracts including those based on risk-sharing and philanthropy. This would be a better reflection of the Islamic banks’ value proposition as it helps boost social activities that have a high impact on the activities of small businesses, contributing to the real economy and promoting well-being in society.

Previous studies mainly relied on mudarabah, mushakarah and zakat separately as they relate to the performance of Islamic banks. This study explores the impact of social finance which includes charity and zakat to examine their impact on Islamic banks’ stability. Further, the authors use institutional quality as a moderating variable in the relationship between Islamic social finance instruments and the stability of Islamic banks.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2022-0441

This study investigates how bank competition affects financial stability and whether government intervention contributes to shaping this relationship in North African countries.

A review of the literature on the subject was conducted, combined with an empirical analysis that used a two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) and a sample of 45 banks operating in North African countries over the period 2005–2019.

The findings reveal a quadratic relationship between competition and banking stability in North African countries. Competition–stability view and competition–fragility view could be applied at the same time for North African banks. Additionally, in this context, results highlight a negative impact of government intervention on financial stability in a competitive financial sector. North African banks operating in a high government intervention quality environment tend to engage in high-risk investments. Robustness checks with alternative measures of competition and banking stability also show consistent results.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the North African context has been explored to determine the role of the quality of government intervention in the relationship between competition and banking system fragility. This paper seeks to cover the shadow field in existing literature through further new information. Thus, it contributes to the emerging market banking literature by showing that both high and low levels of competition can improve financial stability in North African countries. Moreover, it expands its contribution by displaying the moderator effect of intervention quality on the bank competition–stability relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of banking stability in Africa.

The authors present four measures of banking stability embedding banks’ loan loss coverage ratio, insolvency risk, asset quality ratio, and level of financial development, thereby allowing analysis of banking stability determinants from four complementary perspectives: protection for downside credit losses, distress arising from insolvency risk, non-performing loans, and financial development. The authors use the regression methodology to estimate the impact of financial structure, institutional, bank-level factors on bank stability.

The findings indicate that banking efficiency, foreign bank presence, banking concentration, size of banking sector, government effectiveness, political stability, regulatory quality, investor protection, corruption control and unemployment levels are significant determinant of banking stability in Africa and the significance of each determinant depends on the banking stability proxy employed and depends on the period of analysis: pre-crisis, during-crisis or post-crisis.

Banking supervisors in African countries should consider the role of financial structure and institutional quality for banking stability in the African region.

This study is the first to examine banking stability determinants in Africa that takes into account institutional quality and financial structure.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of earnings quality on banking stability in Gulf Cooperation Council countries. First, the author isolates the discretionary loan loss provision (DLLP) to investigate the impact of total LLP, DLLP, discretionary accruals and a small positive variation in net income on bank stability. Second, the author investigates differences that may exist between Islamic banks (IBs) and conventional banks (CBs) in terms of the impact of DLLP on bank stability.

This research is based on unbalanced panel data for 39 IBs and 64 CBs in the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries over the 2000–2014 period.

The findings indicate that the extent of stability is negatively associated with the level of DLLP. This study also found significant differences between the two banking sectors in the effect of DLLP on bank stability.

This study has various practical implications. First, it provides insights for governments and regulators about introducing instruments like borrower restrictions and dynamic provisions to reduce LLP, because it negatively affects banking stability. Second, bankers should carefully assess the effects of their LLP strategies to overcome any negative effects. Third, the findings are also relevant to shareholders, investors and bank customers. More specifically, the results will help to improving their understanding of how LLP is not a financial strength and it is subject to managers’ opportunism that can lead to a financial instability. Finally, this study’s results encourage researchers to investigate an unexplored question, namely, the procyclicality of LLP and its determinants and effects.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to investigate differences that may exist between Islamic and CBs in terms of the impact of DLLP on bank stability.

As an effort to support the quest for a stable financial sector, this study aims to determine the factors that contribute to the financial stability gap in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The estimation techniques used include the fixed and random effect, system general methods of moments and dominance analysis. The data used is annual data for 33 SSA countries, covering the period 2007 to 2018.

Key findings from the analyses indicate that nonperforming loans increase gaps in financial stability while regulatory quality, control of corruption, political stability and appreciation of the local currency reduce the financial stability gap in SSA.

The absence of a specific metric for measuring the financial stability gap appears to be the limitation of this study. Its existence could improve the discussion and also make replicability easier. However, this study relies on a measure introduced by Kulu et al. (2022b), which is also acceptable and quite popular in the literature.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first in the finance literature to estimate the determinants of the financial stability gap in SSA.

THE complexity of the problems which are associated with the lateral stability and directional control of tailless aeroplanes was not realized until rather late.

This paper aims to evaluate how strands of differing investments influence stability in the banking industry using data from 37 countries in Sub-Sahara Africa from 2000 to 2018.

Empirical analyses in the study were carried out using a two-step system Generalized Method of Moments estimation methodology.

Empirical results suggest that generally, growth in investments by governments, foreign investments and private domestic investments have a significant positive impact in stabilizing the banking industry. The empirical estimates further suggest that macroeconomic conditions such as macroeconomic uncertainty adversely affects the liquid reserve position of banks even during periods of appreciable growth in investments.

The authors present a different approach to the banking industry discourse. Instead of surmise the relationship with the direction of impact often emanating from the banking industry to other variables of interest or conditions, this study rather examines how investment dynamics among economies influence the stability of the banking industry overtime. In contrast to related studies, this study examines how strands of investment variables influence the stability of the banking industry. Specifically, this study is modeled to examine the extent to which variability in investment growth (using different investment variables) affect stability in the banking industry.

This paper aims to examine how Indonesian Islamic banks differ from conventional banks in terms of their business model, asset quality, stability and efficiency.

Based on data from 2008 to 2012, the authors use t-test, z-score and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the business model, as well as the asset quality, stability and efficiency of both the Islamic and conventional banks.

The results indicate that there are significant differences between the two – Islamic banks appear to not follow the conventional business model. Secondly, Islamic banks seem to have better asset quality and to be more stable than their conventional counterparts.

Finally, the DEA results also indicate that Islamic banks are relatively more efficient than conventional banks, as shown by their higher overall efficiency, as well as technical efficiency.

Data-driven market segmentation is heavily used by academic tourism and hospitality researchers to create knowledge and by data analysts in tourism industry to generate market insights. The stability of market segmentation solutions across repeated calculations is a key quality indicator of a segmentation solution. Yet, stability is typically ignored, risking that the segmentation solution arrived at is random. This study aims to offer an overview of market segmentation analysis and propose a new procedure to increase the stability of market segmentation solutions derived from binary data.

The authors propose a new method – based on two independently proposed algorithms – to increase the stability of market segmentation solutions. They demonstrate the superior performance of the new method using empirical data.

The proposed approach uses k-means as base algorithm and combines the variable selection method proposed by Brusco (2004) with the global stability analysis introduced by Dolnicar and Leisch (2010). This new approach increases the stability of segmentation solutions by simultaneously selecting variables and numbers of segments.

The new approach can be adopted immediately by academic researchers and industry data analysts alike to improve the quality of market segmentation solutions derived from empirical tourist data. Higher quality market segmentation solutions translate into competitive advantage and increased business or destination performance.

The proposed approach is newly developed in this study. It helps industry data analysts and academic researchers to reduce the risk of deriving random segmentation solutions by analyzing the data in a systematic way, then selecting the most stable solution using the segmentation variables contributing to this most stable solution only.