Bank Capital, Efficiency and Risk: Evidence from Islamic Banks

This study aims to evaluate the relationship between bank capital, efficiency, and risk in Islamic banks. We use data from 129 Islamic banks in the world, retrieved from various data sources. We retrieved specific banking data from Moody's Analytics BankFocus and Thomson Reuters Eikon, while data at the country level was obtained from the World Bank website. This study uses various estimates both Pooled OLS (Ordinary Least Square) and Random Effect (RE). However, to overcome the issue of serial correlation which could cause bias in the results of the study, we used fixed-effect (FE) cluster estimates. The research results confirm the previous findings that bank capital positively affects bank stability (natural logarithm of Z-Score) and negatively affects credit risk (loan loss provision to total liabilities). The findings also show that efficiency has the same effect. The interaction test of bank capital and efficiency shows that efficiency encourages banks to reduce risk, including when bank capital is relatively lower. This finding is expected to have implications for the authorities to boost bank efficiency in addition to establishing several regulations related to capital. The efficiency implemented by the bank will encourage banks to act prudently so that the bank can maintain its performance through risk mitigation.