With the large expansion of Islamic finance in the recent years, sukuk, which are the Sharia-compliant substitute to conventional bonds, are now becoming more prominent. The aim of this study is to examine the impact of sukuk issuance on firm performance. To do so, we analyze how stock market...

This paper conducts an analysis of the relationship between CEO compensation and managerial performance on a large panel of US public firms, by taking into account the different components of CEO compensation. We estimate a stochastic frontier model in which managerial performance is related to...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of corruption in bank lending. Corruption is expected to hamper bank lending, as it is closely related to legal enforcement, which has been shown to promote banks’ willingness to lend. Nevertheless the similarities between the consequences for...

This paper examines the motivations for large firms to choose an Islamic loan over a conventional loan and the recent expansion of Islamic finance activities. We employ a dataset of Islamic and conventional syndicated loans from countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia for the period...

Economic integration on the EU banking markets is expected to favor competition, which should provide economic gains. However, even if there is a commonly accepted view in favor of enhanced bank competition during the last decade, no study has been performed in the 2000s showing this trend. In...

The Arab Spring is expected to enhance the weak quality of institutions in MENA countries. We show in this paper how these changes can contribute to favor the expansion of Islamic finance by analyzing the role of quality of institutions on cost efficiency of Islamic and conventional banks. We...

This paper tackles the question of knowing whether collateral helps solve adverse selection problems in transition countries. We use a unique dataset of about 400 bank loans from 16 transition countries. Our findings support the view of a positive link between the presence of collateral and the...

We study whether bank ownership is related to bank efficiency in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and – surprisingly – that domestic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of...

This paper tests whether corruption can be viewed as an efficient grease in the wheels of an otherwise deficient institutional framework. It does so by analyzing the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance for a panel of 54 countries both...

The objective of this paper is to investigate whether the participation of local banks exerts an impact on the spreads of syndicated loans in Russia. Following Berger, Klapper and Udell (2001), we aim to test whether local banks possess a superior ability to solve information asymmetries. In...