Islamic finance is based on ethical principles in line with Islamic religious law. Despite its low share of the global financial market, Islamic finance has been one of this sector's fastest growing components over the last decades and has gained further momentum in the wake of the financial...

We compare default rates on conventional and Islamic loans using a comprehensive monthly dataset from Pakistan that follows more than 150,000 loans over the period 2006:04 to 2008:12. We find robust evidence that the default rate on Islamic loans is less than half the default rate on...

This paper examines how efficiency dynamics of Islamic and conventional banks compare and how they are converging across different countries. We employ both parametric and non-parametric methods to analyse a panel of Islamic and conventional banks from 23 countries during the period 1999 to...

Are Islamic banks inherently more stable than conventional banks? We address this question by applying a survival analysis based on the Cox proportional hazard model to a comprehensive sample of 421 banks in 20 Middle and Far Eastern countries from 1995 to 2010. By comparing the failure risk for...

This paper examines how efficiency dynamics of Islamic and conventional banks compare and how they are converging across different countries. We employ both parametric and non-parametric methods to analyse a panel of Islamic and conventional banks from 23 countries during the period 1999 to...

External imbalances played a pivotal role in the run-up to the global financial crisis, being an important underlying cause of the ensuing turmoil. While current account (flow) imbalances have narrowed in the aftermath of the crisis, net international investment position (stock) imbalances still...

This paper studies the effects of the bank capital requirements imposed by the European authorities in October 2011 on loan collateral and personal guarantees usage to enhance capital ratios. We use detailed information on the loan contracts granted by a representative Spanish bank and several...

In this paper, we investigate the economy-wide effects of the collateral channel by exploiting: (i) a legal reform in Sweden in 2004 that reduced collateral values, and (ii) a dataset that covers all incorporated firms in Sweden over the period 2000-2006. We find that the loss in collateral...

In spite of growing regulatory pressure in most developed economies, “zombie lending” remains a widespread practice by banks. In this paper we exploit a series of large-scale on-site inspections made on the credit portfolios of several Portuguese banks to investigate how these inspections...

Is monetary policy transmitted through markets for intermediate goods? Analyzing US data on corporate linkages, we document that the financial health of downstream and upstream firms plays a key role in monetary policy transmission. Our estimates suggest that contractionary changes in monetary...