Bank Profitability and Risk Taking in Banks Under Low Interest Rate, Evidence from Banking Sector of Pakistan

The aim of the paper is to analyze the effect of low interest rate on profitability and risk-taking in Pakistani banking sector. By applying static modeling approach and using panel data we collected data from 20 Pakistani banks from 2010-2017 time span. The literature gap existed on this topic in under developing countries. We used two different models for Profitability and Risk-Taking. For Profitability we used NIM, Profit, ROA and ROE as performance proxy. We found the existence of negative relation between low interest rate and profitability which means low interest rate has bad effect on the profitability of the banks. While PCL and TCR taken as proxy for Risk-taking. We also found negative association between Short term interest rate and Risk-taking (TCR and PCL) which means that short term interest rate also effect bank risk-taking. Our study is limited to small sample size and few relevant variables. Further study can explore the underlying phenomenon by using large set of data and more sophisticated approach