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Purpose: The marginalisation of female entrepreneurs in accessing credit is well documented. Yet, how female entrepreneurs navigate through the marginalisation to gain funding is under-explored. Design/methodology/approach: The authors address this gap using qualitative data from 30 female entrepreneurs in three neighbourhoods with varying socio-economic characteristics in Ghana's capital, Accra. Findings: The authors find a marked aversion to bank loans among respondents. Consequently, they nurtured trust in their social circles in order to facilitate access to informal credit from internal (e.g. family and friends) and external (e.g. trade credit, associations and religious organisations) sources. This aversion to loans from formal financial institutions (FFIs) had a socio-cultural aspect, including cumbersome application procedures, a deep-rooted fear of the social consequences of defaulting and religious prohibition against interest payment for Islamic traders. Social implications: This paper shows that providing formal access to credit is not enough to support women's entrepreneurship if the socio-cultural factors inhibiting women's access to credit from FFIs are not addressed. Originality/value: The findings suggest that trust is an important factor that bridges the gap in female entrepreneurs' access to funding given their heavy reliance on informal sources of funding. Peer review: The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-02-2023-0090 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the predictive role of the consistency of tone between credit rating experts and bank managers on bank bankruptcy risk and systemic risk. Firstly, the article collected 716 reports, which are the intersection of credit rating reports and bank annual reports of all US commercial banks from 2006 to 2022. Secondly, the FINBERT model was fine-tuned to calculate the tone scores of all reports and the similarity of tones between parties. Empirical analysis revealed that the more positive the tone of credit rating reports, the lower the bankruptcy risk and systemic risk of banks. Furthermore, integrating the perspective of bank managers, the article used a moderation effect experiment to further explore the moderating effect of the tone of bank annual reports and the consistency of tone between parties on the tone of credit rating reports regarding bank risk. The empirical results indicate that the tone of bank annual reports can effectively moderate the predictive effect of credit rating reports on bank risk. Additionally, the consistency of tone index has a significant positive moderating effect on the impact of the tone of credit rating reports on bank risk. This study provides important insights into the exploration of financial text tones on bank bankruptcy risk and systemic risk, suggesting the use of multidimensional text tones for bank risk measurement. It also demonstrates for the first time the importance of consistency of financial text tones in different dimensions in bank risk warning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article expands the investigation of systematic investing to broadly syndicated, leveraged loans. The results reveal that systematic exposures to (short-term) value, momentum, illiquidity, quality, low risk, carry, and a combination thereof are well rewarded. Monthly rebalanced long-only factor portfolios exhibit impressive Sharpe and information ratios, as well as economically and statistically significant alphas. While the performance of factor portfolios declines over longer investment horizons, it remains significant. A key implication of this research is that active credit managers employing factor-neutral loan trading strategies are potentially overlooking a viable source of incremental returns. Thus, the authors propose factor construction/screening approaches that are easy to use and implement from a practical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important for credit managers to focus on the credit risk of a potential customer, but it is equally important to guard against fraud risk and identifying creative scammers. This article will help you stay ahead of financial risks and build your own “fortress” against scammers who are siphoning revenue from your bottom line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effect of Department of Justice lawsuits in the 2010s against large lenders for alleged fraud in the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program. The suits led to more than $5 billion in settlements and caused targeted banks and their peers to precipitously exit the FHA market. Difference-in-differences and triple differences tests exploiting geographic variation in exposure to exiting banks show a 20 percent reduction in FHA lending in heavily exposed areas. This reduction was not associated with improved underwriting standards or lower default rates. Large banks' FHA exit has significantly reduced low-income households' overall access to mortgage credit. JEL classification: G18, G21, G51 Key words: household finance, banking, mortgage, credit access, litigation, housing, 1. Introduction Homeownership is viewed by many economists and policymakers as an important pathway to wealth accumulation and upward social mobility. (1) The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which was created [...]

Promoting gender diversity at different organizational levels remains one of the hotly debated issues in recent years. Motivated by the paucity of research in this area, our study aims to investigate the impact of female managers on the credit risk of microfinance institutions (MFIs). We have collected data from 1004 unique MFIs across 96 countries, covering the period of 2010 to 2018, using the World Bank Mix Market data catalog. The data were then analyzed using several conventional tools and techniques, including endogeneity‐corrected estimators. The findings revealed that the presence of female managers lowers the credit risk of MFIs. The result mostly remains consistent and robust across different techniques and proxies. Therefore, promoting gender diversity at the managerial level could promote the long‐term sustainability of MFIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyse credit as a core element in the political changes and processes of state formation that took place in Sweden in the second half of the seventeenth-century. The study focuses on discussions within the Council of the Realm and at the Diets about how to use the two Swedish seventeenth-century banks as creditors to the state. The two banks were essential parts of an elaborate attempt to the shift public debt regime from one based on private creditors and the personal credit of the king and the men in the government to a regime based on institutional creditors and the credit of the Estates of the Realm. The outcome of the procesess was contingent upon some of the core topics of early modern Europe's political and financial discourses: the nature of the sovereign, the relationship between private interests and the public good, and the role and functioning of representative assemblies. This process marked the beginning of a development in which sovereign borrowing became a public concern, eventually strengthening the Estate's position vis-à-vis the government, and is a significant example of the interconnectedness of politics and credit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of financial inclusion on corporate investment. More specifically, this paper investigates the possibility of a nonlinear relationship between financial inclusion and corporate investment, as well as the moderating effect of audit quality in this this relationship. To do so, we selected a group of 400 listed non-financial firms in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates) over a period from 2007 to 2020. The results show an inverted U-shaped link between financial inclusion and corporate investment, applying the system generalized method of moments (SGMM) method. They also found that audit quality is identified as a moderating factor in the relationship between financial inclusion and corporate investment. Our results show that the interaction of financial inclusion and audit quality improves investment efficiency, but that underinvestment scenario could result from spending free cash-flows on risky projects. The findings of this study could be a valuable contribution to the development of financial inclusion policies and to improving access to credit for policymakers and managers in the MENA region. The combination of financial inclusion and audit quality (internal and external) is indispensable for reducing agency costs and optimizing financial inclusion levels. Impact statement: This paper analyzes the impact of financial inclusion on corporate investment, emphasizing the importance of audit quality. The result reveals an inverted U-shaped relationship between financial inclusion and corporate investment and highlight that audit quality significantly moderates this relationship. The findings have implications for policymakers and managers in the MENA region, emphasizing the need for effective audit practices to reduce costs and improve credit access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective of this research endeavor was to investigate the underlying factors that motivate and barriers that hinder the implementation of environmentally sustainable banking practices within the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. The Primary data was collected using exploratory research interviews with various bank personnel, including branch managers, operational managers, credit managers, and environmental risk analyst. A comprehensive set of 26 interviews were conducted, encompassing bank officials from both public and commercial sectors and representatives from Islamic and conventional banking institutions based on saturation of data. Subsequently, the interview data was transcribed and analyzed through a thematic analysis approach. Upon conducting a comprehensive examination of the data for codes and themes, the findings indicated that various factors motivate the implementation of green banking practices. These factors are risk of default, reputational risk, environmental risk, competitive advantage, social responsibility, customer demand, sustainability, cost-effectiveness, innovation and digitalization, and regulatory compliance. The barriers hindering the adoption of green banking practices encompass several factors, including lack of awareness, regulatory hurdles, high costs, infrastructure investments, resistance to change, a limited range of green products, economic conditions, and a lack of collaboration among various stakeholders involved in the implementation of green banking practices. The study further recommends several factors to reduce barriers to green banking including, regulatory support, awareness campaigns, collaboration among stakeholders, financial support, training and development of employees, and the introduction of green financial products. This study holds significance for various stakeholders, such as regulators, policymakers, and academics. This research made a valuable contribution to the theory and practice of green banking practices by investigating the underlying reasons that motivate and obstacles that hinder the widespread adoption of environmentally sustainable banking practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, there has been a special emphasis on the efficient management of risk while maintaining reasonable performance (not maximizing performance) in credit institutions. Considering the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic at the global and national levels, the conditions for the depreciation of debtors' (customers') repayment capacity and the increase in associated default risk have been triggered. This necessitates the periodic analysis and mutual agreement with debtors to establish methods for debt recovery and their repayment terms, aiming to reduce credit risk. The investigative process involves studying literature in the field at both national and international levels, using practical skills and the experience gained by a large number of credit institution managers, as well as the practical elements acquired by the author in her role as head of the credit department at Cooperatist Bank Unirea Bra ov. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, post-loan management is usually executed in the form of a visit survey conducted by a credit manager. Through a quarterly visit survey, a large number of loan audit short texts, which contain valuable information for evaluating the credit status of small and micro-enterprises, are collected. However, methods for analysing this type of short text remain lacking. This study proposes a method for processing short loan audit texts called fuzzy clustering analysis (FCA). This method first transforms short texts into a fuzzy matrix through lexical analysis; it then calculates the similarity between records based on each fuzzy matrix and constructs an association graph with this similarity. Finally, it uses a prism minimum spanning tree to extract clusters based on different α cuts. Experiments using actual data from a commercial bank in China revealed that the FCA yields suitable clustering results when handling loan audit briefs. Moreover, it exhibited superior performance compared to BIRCH, k-means, and fuzzy c-means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The recent literature on corporate governance and gender diversity underlines that those differences may go beyond a pure or direct effect on firms' performance and in this vein, this study aims to investigate whether the presence of women in leading positions can affect the credit rating indicators. Design/methodology/approach: The authors focus on Italian manufacturing firms, as well as small and medium firms (SMEs), that are often under-represented in previous studies, despite their importance in many economies. The authors extract data on directors and top managers as well as rating classes and credit score indicators, and using a fixed-effects model, the authors analyze the relationship between credit risk mitigation and the inclusion of women among top managers, consistently with the rising empirical literature focused on risk perceptions. Findings: The authors find a significant negative relationship between female participation in top management and credit risk, with a greater impact associated with smaller firms, where the presence of a female top manager might make the difference. The results are robust to different model specifications and estimation strategies, and the authors find different magnitudes of the effects also according to the geographical location of the firm. Research limitations/implications: Because of the chosen sample of manufacturing firms, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to expand the study and test the approach elsewhere. Originality/value: The authors add new and more robust empirical evidence of a negative relationship between female participation in the top management and credit risk by focusing on the entire population of Italian nonlisted manufacturing firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of "green finance" on the sustainability performance of banking institutions with a specific focus on the context of Palestine. A structured questionnaire was administered to gather data from a representative sample of 104 credit managers employed within Palestinian banking, utilizing descriptive statistics, structural equation modeling, and multiple regression analysis. This study examines the intricate interplay of the social, economic, and environmental facets of green financing and their impact on sustainability performance. Moreover, the study explores the potential moderating effect of female representation within financial institutions. The findings suggest that gender diversity and exclusivity significantly contribute to reinforcing the favorable association between green finance and sustainability performance. Integrating green finance into the strategic frameworks of financial institutions can yield environmental benefits and enhance both long-term and short-term sustainability performance, particularly in emerging economies such as Palestine. Ultimately, this study offers valuable insights into the evolution of green finance and its consequential effects on the sustainability performance of financial institutions in emerging countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]