Financial Risk of Conventional and Islamic Banks: Does Institutional Quality Matter?

Abstract

Banks play a significant role in financing the economy and take on risky financial activities based on information and trust as they specialized companies with their own specificities. This study was propelled to unravel the determinants that affect financial risk (liquidity risk and credit risk) for conventional and Islamic banks. The bank-level data of conventional and Islamic banks in the regions of Middle East, Southeast Asia, and South Asia between 2006 and 2014 were collected from the Bankscope, which is a commercial database produced by the Bureau van Dijk. Thus, for conventional banks the obtained results exhibited significantly positive relationship between regulatory quality towards liquidity risk. Then, the relationship between regulatory quality towards credit risk was negatively significant for conventional banks. Meanwhile, as for Islamic banks, the relationship between government effectiveness and regulatory quality towards financial risk was insignificant. Hence, the regulators or policymakers are able to identify specific mechanism to improve the risk management of these banks as well through this study.