Islamic Banks and Financial Stability: Capital Structure, Governance, Financial Risks, Treatment of Distressed Banks and Empirical Analysis

The international financial crisis naturally prompts the question of whether Islamic banks are robust and resilient or may be swept into crisis by a global wave and if so through what channels. This book considers channels through which the world financial crisis would affect Islamic banks, their features that may help contain it and those that may foster post crisis recovery in a dual banking system. The relative financial strength of Islamic and conventional banks is assessed empirically based on evidence covering individual banks in 16 banking systems. The z-score has become a popular measure of bank soundness (Boyd and Runkle, 1993; Maechler, Mitra, and Worrell, 2005; Beck and Laeven, 2006; Laeven and Levine, 2006; Hesse and Čihák, 2007, 2008; Mercieca, Laeven and Levine, 2009; Beck; Demirgüç-Kunt and Merrouche, 2010). With a robust and quantile estimation model, the empirical analysis explores causes of insolvency risk in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Southeast Asian countries, by controlling for various factors, bank-by-bank data, macroeconomic and other system-wide indicators. Our sample covers 467 conventional banks and 90 Islamic banks for the period 2000-2008.

Wassim Rajhi holds a Ph.D. in Finance and Statistics at the University of South Toulon. He had been a teaching assistant of Economics at the University of Aix-Marseille (France) and Kedge Business School. Its researches are focused on banking system and financial stability. He has been consultant of the World Bank with Wafik Grais, Vice President of the Finance sector.