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This study examines whether risk asset exposure affects the financial performance of commercial banks in Cameroon, a bank-dominated economy of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC). Risk asset exposure is measured by lending intensity (the loan-to-deposit ratio) and credit expansion (annual loan growth), and performance by return on assets (ROA). The data form a balanced panel of ten commercial banks over 2014–2024, compiled from the prudential reporting system of the Central African Banking Commission (COBAC) as published by Cameroon's National Economic and Financial Committee. Bank fixed-effects regressions with bank-clustered standard errors are complemented by a wild-cluster bootstrap suited to few clusters, Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, lagged regressors, panel Granger non-causality tests and a within–between (Mundlak) decomposition that separates changes in a bank's own exposure from persistent differences between banks. The main findings are that (i) neither lending intensity nor credit expansion is significantly associated with profitability in any specification (bootstrap p = 0.81 and 0.30), and the confidence intervals exclude effects larger than about one percentage point of ROA; (ii) lending intensity is unrelated to profitability both within banks over time and between banks (between-effect bootstrap p = 0.88); and (iii) the COVID-19 years of 2020–2021 were associated with ROA about 0.70 percentage points lower (bootstrap p = 0.009). The results indicate a limited role for lending exposure, while significant bank fixed effects and the COVID-19 coefficient point to persistent bank heterogeneity and common systemic shocks. Because the sample comprises ten banks under a single regulator, the findings should be interpreted with caution.

This paper examines how uninsured deposits influence credit union funding and whether private excess deposit insurance alters the stability, pricing, and lending capacity of uninsured deposits — deposits that exceed the federal deposit insurance limit. Using U.S. credit union Call Report data from 1995–2022, we exploit variation across institution size, insurance regime, and participation in optional private excess deposit insurance.  We distinguish between pre-crisis (1995–2007) and post-crisis (2009–2022) periods surrounding the 2008 expansion of federal insurance limits.  We document pronounced heterogeneity across the size distribution.  For small credit unions, uninsured deposits are limited in scale and are associated with lower loan intensity.  In contrast, uninsured deposits play a central funding role for large credit unions, which account for 94% of industry assets and 97% of uninsured deposits. For these institutions, uninsured deposits support lending and command higher funding costs — effects that are significantly moderated by excess deposit insurance, reducing funding costs by approximately 27 basis points during the pre-crisis period.  Following 2008, excess insurance participation declines among large institutions but increases modestly among small firms.  Overall, excess deposit insurance functions as a partial substitute for federal coverage, stabilizing uninsured funding without increasing delinquency rates — evidence against moral hazard.

This paper focuses on a classic policy trade-off by unraveling the role of financial deregulation in driving financial stability and exploring how the role of regulatory quality can affect this relationship. To this end, this study uses a balanced panel dataset of 73 countries across a period of ten years starting from 2014. The empirical specification utilizes a two-step System GMM approach, accounting for both endogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity issues, and persistence in financial stability. Specifically, financial stability is measured by non-performing loans (NPLs), which represent the level of risk exposure of national banking sectors. The findings reveal that financial freedom leads to higher level of financial instability, proving theoretical predictions of the excessive risk-taking behavior of lending institutions encouraged with financial deregulation. Furthermore, the interaction term between financial freedom and regulatory quality is statistically significant, suggesting that financial deregulation can be compensated by the quality of regulatory environment. The role of the GDP per capita variable used for stabilizing the findings is significant as it represents the resilience of more developed economies. The implications of the results are complex. In a more institutional context, this finding suggests that financial stability is not a direct function of financial freedom but is conditional on institutional capability. Hence, high regulatory quality can mitigate the instability caused by financial freedom, thereby enabling a balanced approach.

This study examines the stock performance of large and small European banks included in the STOXX 600 Banks index in response to three major macroeconomic shocks the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Employing daily bank stock returns and an event study framework, the analysis measures immediate market reactions through abnormal returns, while subsequent shifts in equity performance are evaluated using volatility, Sharpe ratios, and beta coefficients. The results suggest that large banks tend to exhibit more pronounced short-term losses during shocks compared to smaller banks. In contrast, small banks generally outperform in the medium term following these events, achieving higher risk-adjusted returns despite elevated volatility. Both segments experience increased market correlation and volatility during periods of disruption, indicating heightened systemic risk. Moreover, the type of shock plays a crucial role, with smaller banks often showing greater resilience to localized and geopolitical shocks.

This paper investigates the factors that form bank risks in Bangladeshi state-owned banks. As a representation of bank risk, non-performing loans have been considered the dependent variable for this study. The relevant data have been extracted from six state-owned banks in Bangladesh from 2013 to 2022. The final dataset consists of 60 firm-year observations. The ordinary least square (OLS) regression with robust standard errors model is utilized to find the relationship of bank risks with determinants like asset size, efficiency, liquidity, profitability, leverage ratio, capital adequacy ratio, and loan to asset ratio. The findings say that bank size and loan-to-asset ratio have a highly significant positive relationship with bank risk, whereas profitability, capital adequacy ratio, and bank efficiency have a significant negative association with bank risk. On the other hand, leverage and liquidity are negatively and positively correlated with no statistical significance. To check the study's robustness, another proxy of bank risk, loan loss provision has been used and the results are almost similar. State-owned banks operate in every economy with a different mindset than the general commercial banks. Hence, policymakers should take necessary initiatives based on this study to bring down the high bank risks in state-owned banks in Bangladesh.

This study analyses the impact of external debt on the financial performance of commercial banks in Kenya for the period 2008-2022. Employing descriptive, correlational, and inferential research designs, the study reviewed data from the Central Bank of Kenya, the World Bank, KNBS, and IMF on a quarterly basis. By employing the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, ROE and external debt were further qualified to be stationary at first difference. The results highlighted by the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) analysis indicated a statistically significant negative relationship between external debt and financial performance; the coefficients (-0.8998) confirmed that for every unit of increase in external debt, there would be a decline in ROE by 0.8998 units. The study establishes that external debt has been detrimental to the financial health of Kenyan banks due to the economic pressure it brings to the sector. For this purpose, it suggests that the government should avoid borrowing from external sources, and it has advised the development of measures that encourage overseas investors to invest in the country's banking sector. The policy of attracting FDI can enhance capital availability and alleviate the financial load on banking institutions. Relaxing regulations that restrict foreign investors would pave the way for this and help increase the bank’s performance, thus enhancing long-term economic growth.

This article discusses financial stability related notions of risk, the issue of convergence and cross financial sector prudential intervention. It elucidates the Basel framework shortcomings and enunciates the requirement of setting a reinvigorated prudential framework before proceeding to its essentials in terms of engineering. It highlights an early warning approach dealing with the issue of time reaction mismatch of the prudential authority and the priority of setting a long run forwarded guided approach. The objective of this research is to provide a clue into enhancing prudential setting of instruments, the forwarded guided purview of surveillance as well as hedging and the Balanced Score Card. 

This paper investigates the relation between bank liquidity and borrowing from a lender of last resort on a high frequency basis during a financial crisis.  The paper evaluates weekly observations of individual bank borrowing of clearinghouse loan certificates by a panel of New York Clearing House member banks during the crisis of 1884.  Naturally, banks with higher reserve ratios borrowed lower amounts, but banks replaced a dollar of reserves with less than a dollar of borrowing from a lender of last resort.

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit the world since the end of 2019 and has damaged the world economy, including Indonesia. Banking as a financial institution that provides funding to companies is also affected. Because the pandemic has reduced the company's performance, and this decline in performance has had an impact on banking. The aim of this research is to test whether the Covid-19 pandemic has an impact on the relationship between risk factors and bank performance. Bank performance is measured by profitability which consists of return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE), while bank risk in this study consists of credit risk, liquidity risk, capital, operational risk and the Covid-19 pandemic. The population in this research is the Regional Development Banks (BPD) in Indonesia totaling 34 banks with a sample of 30 banks. The observation period was 4 years with quarterly data so that 320 observation data were collected. Hypothesis testing uses panel data regression, and to select the best regression model, the model will be tested using the Chow-test, Hausman-test, and Lagrange Multiplier test. After the model test was carried out, the fixed effect model was selected as the best model. The research results show that credit risk and operational risk have a significant and negative influence on all profitability, both ROA and ROE. Meanwhile, liquidity risk (LDR) has no effect on both types of profitability, while capital has an effect on ROE but has no effect on ROA. Another interesting result is that the Covid-19 pandemic has no impact on the influence of risk on bank performance.

In the modern world banks are unique. Formally, they are commercial enterprises, but in fact they have a government role, controlling all of the financial activity of the population and organizations. This article examines the roles of banks in the surveillance and pressuring of people that are not usually publicized. There is no political subtext in this article, as the situation described is typical for all countries. The fact that the majority of the examples given are from Russia and the USA simply reflects the experience of the authors. The other important thing to note is that the article describes the ongoing war of “banks against the people,” and the cascade of events is accelerating with nearly every month. And the winner in these intermittent skirmishes is always the same.

Banks are a high-risk industry, which is regulated by the government through the Financial Services Authority (FSA), so bank management must be very careful in managing banks so that risks can be controlled. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of bank risk and third party funds on bank performance. Bank performance is measured by return on assets (ROA), while bank risk consists of operating risk which is measured by operating expenses to operating income ratio (EIR), liquidity risk is measured by loan to deposit ratio (LDR), capital risk is measured by capital adequacy ratio (CAR), and credit risk is measured by non-performing loans (NPL), and third party funds (TPF) are measured by the natural log of total credit. The research population consisted of 46 banks listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange with a sample of 24 banks taken using a purposive sampling technique. The data collection period is four years with quarterly data (2019-2022). To test the hypothesis used panel data regression. After testing the model with the Chow-test and Hausman-test, the best regression model is the fixed effect model. The results of research using the fixed effect model show that operating risk (EIR) has a significant and negative effect on bank performance, while liquidity risk (LDR) has a significant positive effect on bank performance. Meanwhile, the capital adequacy ratio (CAR), non-performing loans (NPL), and third party funds (TPF) have no effect on bank performance.

Is credit card lending by credit unions within the United States primarily a service to members or a profit generating product?  This paper examines the impact of credit card lending on the performance of U.S. credit unions from 2000-2017. A panel data approach using fixed effects regression methodology is undertaken to make comparative analyses of credit union performance across several dimensions including the percentage of the firm’s assets in credit card loans and percent of members with a credit card. Credit unions are stratified into deciles by size and significant results are found using this methodology. Controlling for delinquencies and charge-offs among other variables, credit card lending significantly increases ROA for both large and small credit unions, but only after the Financial Crisis of 2008, and the establishment of the CARD Act in 2009. Interestingly, the ROA of small credit unions significantly increases with the percentage of members using the institution’s credit card.  This result suggests that small credit unions would benefit by increasing the penetration of credit cards within their membership base.

The banking system’s role as an intermediary between depositors and borrowers makes its stability a crucial element of the economy. Individual bank stability impacts the stability of the financial sector and, consequently, the real sector and economic growth. This study is a detailed investigation of bank stability scores for the Turkish banking sector. Turkey experienced a major banking crisis from 2000 to 2001. However, with an improved regulatory environment and structural reforms, its resilience to shocks increased significantly in subsequent years. The present study contributes to the literature in three areas. First, it applies eight variations of the Z-score to the Turkish banking sector to test the importance of time and risk variation. Second, it investigates the impact on stability scores of several factors–the implementation of new capital regulations and Basel III liquidity rules, the Turkish lira crisis and the effects of COVID-19). Finally, it measures the contribution to systemic risk of each Turkish bank using the leave-one-out (LOO) Z-score method; this is the first study to use this method to analyse the contribution of different bank types to the overall stability of the sector.

The paper examines four main sources of financial risk exposure for four banks in the United Arab Emirates during the years 2003 to 2009. It begins by measuring stability levels for different types of financial risks using the coefficient of variation measure. The research then proceeds to investigate the nature of the relationship between financial risk and the actual reported financial performance of each company, namely the return on equity and return on assets. The findings show that all four sources of financial risk showed significant stability while both profitability indicators exhibited significant instability over the same period. Moreover, performance on the return on assets indicator was strongly and positively tied to a company’s return on equity indicator across the four banks but exhibited little or no interconnection with the four types of risks that banks are commonly exposed.

Although community banks hold a small proportion of U.S. banking assets and market share, they perform a crucial function in the U.S. economy by offering vital financial services to businesses and individuals in regions where major banks do not operate. Their diseconomies of scale put them at a competitive disadvantage in relation to large, national commercial banks when coping with digital transformation and regulatory requirements. These challenges mounted after the Great Recession. This research, with the usage of four key financial ratio categories and the implementation of logit regression, looks into how U.S. community banks evolved in the aftermath of the financial crisis, 2009-2017. It divides the entire sample period into two sub-sample periods, 2009-2012 and 2013-2017, and comparing community banks with their larger counterpart and within the community bank sector between the largest and the smallest asset size quartiles of the group. This study, to the best of our knowledge, represents the only known research at the time of publication that compares recovery of banks post the Great Recession based on whether they are community or non-community banks. It finds that community banks tended to recover more slowly in terms of the bottom line, ROE, after the Great Recession than large national banks. Additionally, community banks are more likely to carry even less capital than their national counterparts in the later time period as compared with the earlier time period. In contrast, banks with higher liquidity and greater operating efficiency are more associated with community banks than non-community banks. Also, the empirical findings posit that size matters, to a certain extent. That is, while size does not command an absolute advantage, a certain threshold may be necessary for a bank to stay competitive. This provides a rationale for mergers and acquisitions taking place in the banking sector.

This paper aims to analyse the effects of financial statement indicators and off-balance sheet items affecting risk measures among Indian banks employing both panel data regression and a non-parametric decision tree approach. We explore the effects of bank size, leverage, exposure to contingent liabilities including off-balance sheet derivatives usage and macroeconomic factors on risk measures for banks. In this paper, it is also aimed to examine the effects of the major financial liberalization policy period in the domestic market in India that started in the mid-1990s and ended around 2004 as well as impacts of the 2008 global financial crisis on the risk measures of banks operating in India.  As risk measures, we present a comparative analysis of liquidity, solvency, and interest rate risk measures of Indian banks across public (government) and private ownership categories. Main findings from our study demonstrate (i) significant impact of capital adequacy and the bank size on all the risk measures, (ii) contingent liabilities (including derivatives usage) at banks is observed to significantly impact the asset management measure of liquidity risk and the solvency risk of banks, (iii) GDP growth is observed to impact the asset management and liability management measure of liquidity risk, (iv) the global financial crisis is found to have a significant impact on the liquidity risk measures and interest rate risk, but a weak effect on solvency risk of Indian banks, (v) bank ownership category (government owned versus private sector banks) is observed to have a significant impact on all the risk measures, and finally (vi) financial liberalization reforms had a highly significant effect on the liquidity risk at banks.

The crux of bank accounting is how to measure and disclose ex ante credit risk, as loan yields and cost of funds are determined by managerial effectiveness and the financial market. This paper examines how the practice of setting up provisions for loan losses by bank managers had changed to preserve regulatory capitals around the 2008 financial crisis. This paper examines the empirical relationship between ex ante credit loss, which is proxied by loan losses provisions, and realized credit loss, which is measured by net charge-off. The empirical relations are examined before, during, and after the 2008 financial crisis to find the patterns of prediction errors of the incurred loss model. This paper obtains evidence that the empirical relation between non-performing assets and provisions for loan losses weakened at the time of a financial crisis. The relations of net charge-offs and allowance for loan losses on provisions for loan losses amplified during a financial crisis by accounting design. After the financial crisis is over, the empirical relation between non-performing assets and provisions for loan losses does not return back to the pre-crisis relation, but to a different, new post-crisis relation. This paper obtains evidence that financially stable banks in terms of the tier 1 capital ratio, return on assets, market-to-book ratio, or dividend payout ratio tend to adjust provisions for loan losses in a larger scale in response to a financial crisis than less stable banks.

The paper’s purpose was to assess whether the effects on the regulatory capital of the ECL model in European banks differs among those that adopted IRB or standardized approaches to credit risk management. The empirical tests revealed that there was a significant reduction in the level of capita buffers of European banks when the IFRS 9 was first adopted, and that this reduction was more pronounced among banks using a standardized approach to credit risk than for those that relied on an IRB approach. Further testing confirmed the premise that there was an underestimation of capital requirements in the period prior to the adoption of the ECL. The study fills a gap in literature, by evaluating the difference in the impact of adopting the ECL model on the banking system, as a function of the credit risk management approach for capital purposes. The assessment of what happened in the European banking system can be used as a guidance to other jurisdictions still in transition to the ECL model.

This paper describes how behavioral biases influence the resolution of financial covenant violations. Prior literature documents that violation waivers are common; however, there is a lack of discussion on the determinants that lead loan officers to waive covenant violations. We rely on the escalation of commitment bias (or the sunk cost phenomenon) to discuss how loan officers may become attached to a selected course of action and fail to incorporate new information, increasing the likelihood of covenant waivers. We explain the implications of this bias on bank financial reports by detailing how accounting links loan quality to bank financial statements. We further draw on the psychology literature to offer potential solutions to mitigate overcommitment in the context of loan officers. Future research can examine the extent to which loan officers knowingly or unknowingly steer away from rational decision-making. This study has practical implications as users of bank financial reports, including investors, auditors, examiners, and bank managers, learn about processes and challenges on how accounting mechanics link bank loan portfolios to financial statements.

Averting the risk of falling short on the expected profitability of a bank requires the knowledge of the underlying determinants. Knowledge of long-run underlying determinants of profitability assists banks in comprehensive planning. In this backdrop, the paper seeks to identify the long-term fundamental risk factors and their impacts on their profitability. The FM-OLS regression method is employed using annual data on the components of profitability as well as internal and external determinants of profitability of Amalgamated Bank of South Africa (ABSA) bank from 1998 to 2014. The study is particularly importance since bank-specific studies aimed at identifying long-run fundamental factors of profitability has not been given much attention in literature. Evidence from the study indicates that profitability of ABSA is cointegrated with its determinants. It is further observed that, with the exception of inflation and GDP, all the determinants have significant long-term impact on profitability. However, although size has significant impact on net interest margins, its impact on return on equity is insignificant. The results further suggest that capital and stock market capitalization pose risk to aggregate profitability of ABSA. It is therefore recommended that in future, ABSA should resort to optimal equity financing to maximize its expected profitability.