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Purpose This paper aims to explore the role of digital financial inclusion (DFI) in stabilizing the Islamic banking sector amidst the current COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach This study has used the Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE), Two-Stage Panel Least Squares-Instrumental Variables (2SLS-IV) and Two-Step System Generalized Method of Moments (2SGMM) dynamic panel estimation method to investigate the DFI-Islamic banking stability nexus using an unbalanced panel data of 65 Islamic banks from six countries over the period 2011–2020. Findings The result suggests that greater implementation of DFI promotes Islamic banking stability, which reduces the default risk of the banks in the studied region. Consequently, incorporating DFI into the Islamic banking sector encourages inclusive economic growth that can keep the financial sector sustainable even in a crisis period like the current COVID-19 pandemic. Originality/value Unlike previous studies, the authors have focused mainly on DFI and the Islamic banking sector. This is one of the first to explore how DFI contribute to the stability and productivity of the Islamic banking sector during the pandemic. Also, this study provides fresh evidence on how the supply and demand side of DFI impact Islamic banking stability.

Financial inclusion has gone beyond the rhetoric surrounding social development and financial stability, but also expanding into pathos of arbitrage benefits made from cheap retail deposits by large banks and banks from technologically developed regions. This study investigates whether a higher degree of fintech-based financial inclusion (FFI) intensifies banks’ risk-taking by analysing data from 534 banks from 24 OIC countries. The results indicate that higher degree of FFI controls bank’s risk-taking behaviour. The nexus turns stronger in the post-industrial revolution 4.0 (IR4.0) era. Our results are robust across multiple proxies and estimation methods. We discuss how competition surrounding investing in fintech may expose the banks towards severe uncertainty.

Fintech innovations are rapidly transforming the global financial industry and easing the financial inclusion initiatives of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Such technological transformations are expected to promote stability in the financial system and in turn reduce the risk-taking behavior of its main actors. However, there is limited or no empirical evidence to confirm the impact of fintech-based financial inclusion (FinFI) on the risk-taking behavior of Sub-Saharan African MFIs. Thus, we have developed a new index to measure FinFI and empirically assess its role in reducing the risk-taking attitude of MFIs. The validity of our results was confirmed by using various robustness tests.

Banks play a crucial role in bringing stability and economic development through their expected contribution in proper financial resource mobilisation across the economy. Despite the importance, there is little focus in recent literature which provided the empirical evidence how the global financial crisis affect the bank efficiency in Bangladesh. Thus, this paper aims to examine the effect of the global financial crisis and other factors on the efficiency of Bangladesh commercial banks. By employing the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method, we computed the technical efficiency of individual banks operating in the Bangladesh banking sector during 2000 to 2013. The empirical findings indicate that the Bangladesh banking sector has exhibited the highest efficiency level during 2001, while efficiency seems to be at the lowest level during 2010. The study finds that crisis along with bank size, capital adequacy ratio, return on average equity and real interest rate have a significant effect on bank efficiency in Bangladesh. In order to keep the sound financial development of Bangladesh, banks operating in the Bangladesh banking sector have to consider all the potential technologies which could improve their profit efficiency levels, since the main motive of banks is to maximise shareholders’ value or wealth through profit maximisation.

This paper aims to investigate whether, and to what extent, total quality management (TQM) influences bank loan quality. We propose an approach to measure TQM for evaluating this relationship. The proposed measure is the residual from the Fama–MacBeth regression based on bank efficiency proxied by the income-to-cost ratio. Our proposed TQM measure is statistically significant. We obtain data of 581 US commercial banks from the SNL Financial database for the period 1991–2013 with a total of 13,303 bank-year observations. The result shows that TQM is positively related to bank loan quality. This suggests that the implementation of better TQM can help management to monitor borrowers, improve competition and efficiency, manage good-quality loan portfolios, minimise expenses, and generate more revenues. This research has several implications for regulation, TQM implementation, and policy for the banking industry. In sum, an association between TQM and loan quality allows us to expand our knowledge of the speci...

This paper assesses farmers’ willingness to pay for an efficient adaptation programme to climate change for Malaysian agriculture. We used the contingent valuation method to determine the monetary assessment of farmers’ preferences for an adaptation programme. We distributed a structured questionnaire to farmers in Selangor, Malaysia. Based on the survey, 74% of respondents are willing to pay for the adaptation programme with several factors such as socio-economic and motivational factors exerting greater influences over their willingness to pay. However, a significant number of respondents are not willing to pay for the adaptation programme. The Malaysian government, along with social institutions, banks, NGOs, and media could come up with fruitful awareness programmes to motivate financing the programme. Financial institutions such as banks, insurances, leasing firms, etc. along with government and farmers could also donate a substantial portion for the adaptation programme as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR).