Religiosity and Bank Asset Securitization

Omneya Abdelsalam, Marwa Elnahass and Sabur Mollah ()
Additional contact information
Omneya Abdelsalam: Durham University
Marwa Elnahass: Newcastle University

No 2018-13, Working Papers from Swansea University, School of Management

Abstract: The global financial turmoil of 2007–2008 underlines the importance of understanding asset securitization, a process that allows banks to shed credit risk, fund their credit growth, and arbitrage capital requirements. Examining this ethically questionable activity has become crucial given its perceived long-term social impact. This paper examines the factors that motivate banks’ decisions to enter into asset securitization. In particular, we examine the influence of both organizational and geographic religiosity as important ethical parameters of economic choices on banks’ decisions to securitize their assets. We employ propensity scores using a unique database on asset securitization of banks in 22 countries during the period of 2003–2012. We find that both types of religiosity indicators are significantly associated with banks’ decisions to securitize. Banks located in countries with high religious importance scores show a lower likelihood to securitize. We also find that religiously adhered banks are likely to embark on a constrained model of securitization, which involves a high level of monitoring. In addition, our analysis suggests that religiously adhered banks are less likely to engage in asset securitization to reduce credit risk by shifting it to new investors. This conclusion is supported by their lower credit risk in the years before securitization. Alternatively, our results suggest that these banks embark on asset securitization to improve their financial and regulatory performance. Our study emphasizes the importance of considering religiosity as an important institutional factor and a monitoring mechanism in future global banking studies. Findings in this study are of importance to researchers, to local and international regulators, and to different stakeholders in the international banking sector.

Keywords: Asset Securitization; Bank type; Religiosity; Bank Risk. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 G01 G21 G28 L50 M41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2018-02-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://rahwebdav.swan.ac.uk/repec/pdf/WP2018-13.pdf First version, 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:swn:wpaper:2018-13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Swansea University, School of Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Syed Shabi-Ul-Hassan ().