Effects of corporate governance mechanisms on financial flexibility, risk-taking behaviour and risk management effectiveness : a comparison study between conventional and islamic banking systems

Abstract

This thesis focuses on four major topics in banking: corporate governance mechanisms, financial flexibility, risk-taking and risk management effectiveness of banks. It enhances understanding of how differences in corporate governance structures between Islamic and Conventional banks might affect their decision-making process regarding their corporate financial and risk management policies. Employing a sample of 28 Islamic banks and 37 conventional banks operated in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region over the period 2009–2015, the thesis comprises three main objectives. Firstly, a comparison study between Islamic (IBs) and Conventional banks (CBs) is conducted to investigate the impacts of the board of directors structure, the existence of dedicated risk committee, and the Shari’ah supervisory board (SSB) on banks financial flexibility. The results indicate a positive relationship between board size and financial flexibility for Conventional banks. Intriguingly, this relationship turns to be negative for Islamic banks. Furthermore, it also shows that the existence of a dedicated risk committee enhances the financial flexibility of both CBs and IBs in general. In the context of Islamic bank per se, the evidence is obtained such that SSBs size and percentage of members who have multi-membership have a positive association with the IBs financial flexibility. The second objective of this thesis is to investigate the effects of the new risk governance framework (i.e. a dedicated risk committee (RC) and a Chief Risk Officer (CRO)) on the bank risk-taking behaviour for both conventional and Islamic banking systems. In extending the literature (which is quite scarce) concerning the relationship between risk governance and risk-taking, this study investigates five main risk aspects: market, credit, operational, liquidity, and insolvency risks. Furthermore, this study is the first to be conducted in Islamic Banks. The findings indicate a negative association between risk governance index and risk perspectives across both CBs and IBs— except as regards credit risk since that is only applicable to CBs. Last but not least, the third objective of this thesis is to investigate how risk governance influences the effectiveness of banks in managing their risks. The study finds that CBs performance is more positively associated with risk-taking for banks with stronger risk governance. In other words, these risk governance mechanisms significantly improve the effectiveness of risk management within CBs but do not influence the risk management effectiveness of IBs