Since its inception, Islamic banking in Pakistan has shown remarkable growth and development. Most recent statistics unveil that industry has captured around 13% of the total banking market in Pakistan. This outstanding augmentation of the industry highlights the crucial role of Islamic banks...

We document that a firm's culture — specifically, its religiosity — affects its cost of debt. Firms in higher-religiosity counties have higher credit ratings and lower debt costs. The impact of religiosity is stronger for firms with greater information asymmetry and during recessions....

Using unit-level data on the entire population of registered manufacturing SMEs in 2007 for India, we explore the impact of religiosity on their access to finance. The findings indicate that certain categories of religion, such as Hindus and Sikhs, are less likely to have access to institutional...

Inefficiencies in mainstream credit markets have pushed selected households to frequent high cost payday loans for their liquidity needs. Ironically, despite the prohibitive cost there is still persistent demand for the product. This paper rides on the public policy objective of expanding...

This paper examines the pass-through from the market interest to the rate charged on bank loans using aggregate data for the U.K. Thereby, we explicitly disentangle credit supply and demand and allow the interest rate charged on loans to depend on the volume of loans. We find that, although...

A crucial condition for the existence of a credit channel through bank loans is that monetary policy should be able to change bank loan supply. This paper contributes to the discussion on this issue by presenting empirical evidence from dynamic panel estimations based on a dataset that comprises...

This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

This paper presents evidence on the industry effects of bank lending in Germany and identifies the industry effects of bank lending associated with changes in monetary policy and industryspecific bank credit demand. To this end, we estimate individual bank lending functions for 13 manufacturing...

Relationship lending is a common practice in credit financing all over the world, particularly in Germany. On the basis of a comprehensive data set comprising information on firm-bank relationships for more than 16,000 observations, this study analyses the determinants of relationship lending in...