We examine the impact of competition and portfolio diversification on banking stability for conventional and Islamic banks in Indonesia. We find that the Islamic banking sector is less stable, when compared to the conventional banking sector. Competition in the banking sector reduces stability, while diversification enhances it. We find that competition negatively impacts the Islamic banks, but diversification has no impact on these banks. An interesting finding is that competition and diversification complement each other in enhancing the stability of the Indonesian banking sector. These findings carry an important policy implication for the banking sector of Indonesia.

Globally, the awareness about sustainability has increased due to the lingering environment, social and governance-related issues. In this perspective, the role of social media and consumer awareness are important since they influence the corporate sector to care for sustainable development. Banks, being very important to the economy, contribute to sustainability through their internal (through governance, data security, etc.) and external (through environment-friendly loans , financial inclusion, etc.) practices. These practices are collectively called as environment, society, and governance (ESG) sustainability. ESG practices by banks are important since they operate on public funds, have interconnections with the businesses and at times bailed out at the expense of taxpayers. An intriguing question, though, is whether these ESG activities impact bank profitability and risk. Further, as identified in the literature, there are certain moderators such as competition and institutions which may impact the ESG-profitability and ESG-risk relationship. We investigate these relationships for Organization for Islamic Countries (OIC) and Non-OIC countries. Specifically, we employ data of 341 banks from 65 countries, further divided into Non-OIC (54 countries, 295 banks) and OIC countries (11 countries, 46 banks). ESG data has been used for the years 2007-2016 while the dynamic panel model has been estimated using the Generalized Methods of Moments technique ...

The study aimed to determine the antecedents or drivers of the Halal food and beverage trade. The Halal F&B statistics were manually derived by applying the Shariah principle of "presumption of permissibility" and the WTO assumption when assigning HS codes on the specific trade concerns database to determine the approximate value of Halal F&B trade between countries, which is an important contribution of this study. We utilized the gravity model of international trade and the Poisson-Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) approach, which is the gravity model's commonly suggested estimator. The examined samples include bilateral trade data from 59 nations (20 OIC members) between 2007 and 2016. The tested determinants are the variables of the economy, distance, level of income, exchange rate, regional trade agreement, common border, common language, colonial relationship, and landlocked commerce. Results indicate that the economic size of trade partners, regional trade agreements, shared borders, and common language significantly positively impact the value of Halal F&B exports. In contrast, distance, exporting nation income, exchange rate, and landlocked trade significantly negatively impact. Meanwhile, it appeared that neither the income level of the importing country nor its colonial relationship had a substantial impact on commerce.