Search results

Empirical studies, to date, show that financial inclusion (FI) enhances financial stability (FS) by promoting a large deposit base, reducing information asymmetry, and strengthening market power on the one hand, and leads to financial fragility by expanding credit without proper screening, increasing operational costs, and provoking borrowers' moral hazard on the other. Thus, the most important issue is to maintain FS while extending formal financial services to the impoverished and disadvantaged segments of society. Therefore, this paper investigates the efficacy of macroprudential regulations (MPRs) to align these policy divergences.

To accomplish the objective and facilitate policy implications, the authors use aggregated and disaggregated measures of both FI and MPRs, employ advanced econometric models that minimize endogeneity and ensure robustness, and investigate their joint effectiveness in upholding FS using data of 138 countries spanning the 2004–2017 years.

The findings indicate that the effectiveness of MPRs is instrument specific. Some MPRs that obstruct access to formal financial services, in particular, moderate the advantage of FI in achieving FS, while others boost the effect of inclusion in attaining financial sector stability. Therefore, prudence should be emphasized while designing MPRs as a tool for aligning the policy trade-off between FI and FS.

To the best of the authors knowledge, this paper extends previous empirical research by investigating the conditioning impact of MPRs in the FI-FS nexus.

Despite numerous evidence of policy trade-off in financial inclusion-stability nexus, little is known about the role of governance quality to align policy goals and maximizing the social benefits. Therefore, to fill the gap, this study focuses to investigate the moderating effect of country governance (CG) in the interplay between financial-inclusion (FI) and financial-stability (FS), using a large panel of 84 economies covering the years 2004–2017.

For attaining this objective, the study constructs several indexes for FI, FS and CG using principal component analysis (PCA) and examines how FI influences FS at different CG levels applying advanced econometrics.

The results show that CG plays a very crucial role in eradicating the trade-off and strengthens the synergy between FI and FS. The findings are insensitive to several robustness validations and could be constructive for policymakers to devise policies and to ensure financial stability.

As far as the authors are aware, this is the only paper that empirically explains CG's role in FI-FS nexus.

This paper aims to investigate the debated nexus of financial inclusion (FI) and financial stability (FS) in a comprehensive way, with several indicators of FI, considering nonlinearity and cross-country heterogeneity.

The authors introduce several indexes for FI by applying principal component analysis (PCA) and explore their impact on stability for a sample of 108 countries and subsamples based on income grouping as well as for pre- and post-crisis episodes over the period 2004–2017. To address the heterogeneity and endogeneity, the authors use the two-step quantile regression (2SQR), three-stage least square (3SLS) and two-step system-GMM (System-GMM).

The findings reveal that the relationship of FI and stability depends on the measurement of FI used and the heterogeneity of different macroeconomic factors. Besides, there is nonlinearity, irrespective of the measurement of inclusion used. The findings also confirm that the effect of FI is more prominent in countries with strong governance. The results are robust to several robustness validations, which could be useful for policymakers to align the divergence of these policies and ensure FS while expanding access to formal financial services.

This study makes an attempt to explore the reasons behind the debated empirical findings of the existing literature by revisiting the nexus using several disaggregated indexes, each representing individual dimension and a multidimensional index, examine the possible nonlinearity and investigate the conditioning effect of different macroeconomic factors that might play a significant role in this relationship.

Since the strike of the 2007-2008 global financial crises, financial stability has been discussed with immense interest in academic and policy circles. Following this essence, this paper aims to investigate the nexus of financial inclusion, competition concentration and financial stability.

To analyze this relationship, this study uses different inclusion indices constructed by principle component analysis, Boon indicator, different concentration measures and Z-score, for a sample of 92 countries and subsamples based on income and economic grouping of those countries as well as for pre- and post-crisis episodes over the period of 2004-2014. This study also investigates the variation in inclusion–stability relationships in the presence of competition and concentration. This study uses two-step system-generalized method of moments (GMM) and two-stage least square to address the endogeneity.

The study finds that competition contributes to stability; however, there is evidence of fragility in the presence of concentration in the banking industry. Moreover, this study finds a U-shaped inclusion–stability relationship. The overall results of this study support the competition–stability view and a trade-off between inclusion and stability, which are consistent and robust to alternative econometric tests.

Financial inclusion should be endorsed with caution in low-income, middle-income and emerging countries, and prudent policies should be taken to govern the market concentration to maintain financial stability.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to explain the impact of financial inclusion on financial stability in the presence of market heterogeneity.