Are the factors accounting for islamic and conventional bank credit cycles really different ? Malaysian evidence based on two-step GMM approach

Credit instability can cause severe negative impact to the long-term economic growth. It is also directly related to the recurring systemic banking and financial crisis. Driven by these motivations, this study aims to empirically analyze the factors that might explain credit cycle at bank level by taking Malaysia as the case study. We aim to make a comparison between Islamic and conventional banks by identifying whether the factors accounting for credit cycles between the two systems are different. By dividing the estimations into two data sets, the findings suggest: lagged credit cycle, asset price, excessive extension of bank credit and capital outflow are the factors that might influence credit cycle in the long term. While in the short-term, the factors are asset price, availability of loanable funds, banks’ capital, banks’ size, inflation, real interest rate, and capital outflows. Interestingly, our analysis supports empirically that there are some differences between Islamic and conventional banking system. Our findings acknowledged that Islamic banks hold some unique characteristics in the principles of its operations. Another important implication is that policy makers and industry players could observe the behaviour of the suggested factors and take the right actions to reduce the severity of the impact of unpredictable credit crunch.